


feels like home

by outwardbound93



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Coming of Age, Growing Up Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 07:08:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6507667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry shouldn’t feel so much like a little boy tucked into his sister’s side when he spent most of last night twined around Niall in his bed, competing to see who could get the other off more times. But growing up doesn’t seem to work like that. It’s not a switch that gets flicked, it’s like seeing where you want to go and building yourself a bridge to that place. Sometimes where you end up is nothing like you expected, and sometimes it’s like coming home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feels like home

**Author's Note:**

> it takes a village to write a fic, so i owe a lot of really beautiful people for helping me write this one. arwa, beta extraordinaire, and the best best friend. dani and priya and jamie and amy and taylor and saf for their patience with me. and everyone who's ever read or left kudos or a comment from the very beginning. i started writing bc i wanted to deal with the band gone on hiatus, but this one's about us as much as it is them. thank you for everything.
> 
> the title for this fic comes from one direction's 'home.' the post for this fic is [here](https://niallspringsteen.tumblr.com/post/142629652032/feels-like-home-by-outwardbound93-on-ao3-32k) and you can listen to the mix for this fic [here](http://8tracks.com/niallspringsteen/you-are-not-alone).

Harry takes the train from New York to Boston by himself. Anne and Robin offered to help him with the move – well, more like Anne insisted and Robin took Harry quietly aside and asked if he was really quite very definitely sure that he wanted to go alone – but Harry didn’t back down.

He makes the move on a Friday, and it had felt right somehow for life to go on without him just the same as it always had. His mom went to work at the bank where she’d started out as a teller, and his stepdad took the subway from their narrow brownstone on Park Slope to his job as a real estate agent in Manhattan, and at 8:08am, Harry boarded the train for Boston University.

Light glints through the many windows arching over their heads at Penn Station like those in a greenhouse. A dramatic farewell with his mum waving her handkerchief at him as though Harry was a soldier going off to war near the turn of the century might have been nice if Harry didn’t already feel like he’d had that at graduation.

It feels like there’d been no time between stepping into her tight embrace at graduation, the space between his thumb and forefinger still tingling from the way his graduation cap cut into the sensitive skin when he caught it coming down, and boarding the train today. The summer, only just ended, seems to have passed in a single nonspecific moment of beating bread dough into lumpy loaves for baking.

The words she murmured into his ear rattle around Harry’s head like the sound of the pistons firing up to push the train along. “You make me proud to be your mother,” she said. Maybe it’d been an observation but it kind of felt like a command. Anyway, Harry’s trying.

Harry gives up picking at the torn knee of his jeans and tips his head against the rattling train window in an effort to get a little rest. He couldn’t hardly sleep last night for going over and over in his head the list of things he’d had to bring with him. Textbooks, check. Laptop, check. Two pairs of jeans, two sweaters, three t-shirts, eight pairs of boxers, check. The wrinkled and faded photographs of Anne with much younger versions of Harry and Gemma on Halloween, her own face painted like a cat’s, carefully zipped into the inner pocket of his suitcase, check. Everything he’d need for the four months between leaving home and coming back to visit for Thanksgiving.

He accepts half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the sweet grandmotherly woman with the big orange purse that smells of mothballs and caramels sat next to him in his carriage, and that’s when Gemma calls. “Hey,” he answers the phone, relaxing into the corner of the carriage.

“Hey, yourself, baby brother,” she answers easily. Harry closes his eyes and imagines her face, so much like his, but brighter, wider, something more like an open book. He can’t stop himself from smiling. “How’s the move going?”

“Almost in Boston,” Harry says, watching nothing but green fly past outside the train window. Well, almost to Boston. Big cities have a way of sneaking up on a person even with Google Maps open on his phone. There’s a whole lot of nothing but telephone poles, shaggy cows and scrubby trees, and then buildings start rising up from increasingly narrow streets like the train is propelled along the circulatory system of the city like the beating of a giant heart.

Gemma lets out a little breath of relief. “Good. You got everything?”

“Everything’s good,” he confirms, half-laughing. “Honestly, Gem, you act like Mom. Yes, I brushed my teeth this morning. Yes, I combed my hair,” he snorts.

“Well,” she says, bristling. “It’s not my fault that you require a lot more taking care of than a normal boy.”

The comment draws Harry up short, makes his breath catch in his chest. He hardly called her all summer, all last spring, so as not to bug her. She’s still his best friend but something changes when you don’t feel like you’re the most important thing in someone’s life anymore. He wonders if she can even feel the difference, like the picture he carries around with him in his mind’s eye of the way she looks is ever-so-slightly out of date.

Gemma breezes on like she didn’t notice Harry’s lag in conversation. “Got your head in the clouds all the time, no wonder you trip so much.”

Harry looks at the scab on his knee. “I don’t trip that much,” he says, the laugh feeling like it’s been squeezed out of him. “Anymore,” he adds ruefully.

“Love you,” Gemma says. “Always.”

“I love you, too,” Harry says. The train pistons past a farm with a bunch of black and white dairy cows held in check by a wooden fence strung up with barbed wire, the wood dark and wet from drizzling rain. “I’ll see you soon, you know.”

“Any day you want me to come down from school, you just let me know,” Gemma offers easily, probably secure in the knowledge that Harry won’t. Columbia’s graduate school is way more important than Harry wanting her to come to Boston and sneak candy into the dollar movie theatre with him and try on outrageous outfits at the thrift store. “Promise.”

Harry nods. “Promise, Gem.”

“Good boy,” Gemma says warmly, and then she hangs up.

The sky overhead clears up to an azure blue, and the rolling farmland gives way to thunderous highways full of commuters, gas stations and banks and grocery stores and parking lots, and the train rolls into Back Bay station.

Harry collects his suitcase from the overhead rack that leaves flecks of peeled gold paint on his case and steps off the train, breathing in exhaust and McDonald’s fumes. He checks the directions he wrote down last night, redoubles his sweaty grip on the handle of his suitcase, and sets off down Dartmouth St toward campus.

The streets of Boston aren’t so very different from Park Slope. Rows of brownstones stand shoulder to shoulder over narrow streets unevenly paved after decades of wear and tear, and the sun glints off the bits of sand in the sidewalk that makes them sparkle. The air smells a little different, though, less like art and music, more like books and learning, although Harry’s probably just projecting.

There’s more space for trees, too, not just the two-foot-wide circles carved out of the pavement to allow for a scrawny spruce tree. It’s nice. Less like an alien world than he expected, and he’s grateful he didn’t sleep on the train and wake up somewhere new. Instead, he got to watch it all change. He can smell himself in the heat, and he resolves to change into shorts the moment he gets into his new apartment.

He figures out where to check-in by following other students laden down with baggage. Some of them have parents helping them move, like the long-haired girl Harry watches climb out of the SUV with her parents. The car beeps when her dad presses the lock button on the key fob, and she and Harry give each other nervous little nods.

The hall where long tables are set up to pass out keys and forms with lists to check off in case there’s any prior damage to their new residences is packed full of students and parents. Tables off to the side dispense lemonade and water and cookies, and Harry thinks longingly about going over and getting himself a snack. He doesn’t dare step out of line, though, and he doesn’t have anyone to hold his spot for him.

Being surrounded by supportive families makes Harry’s throat ache. He wishes he’d brought his mom and Robin, even though they were both bound to fuss over him way more than he needed, and he’s never quite sure what to say when his mom starts crying. Normally he just starts crying, too. He couldn’t say sorry, though; he can’t be, when he’s doing just what she raised him to do. It’s silly. He shouldn’t cry. He has to try very hard not to let out a dry little sob.

The upperclassman wearing a t-shirt plastered with the words _Boston University Move-In Team 2012_ in bright neon letters asks him for his last name, so Harry tells her. She flips through the box full of folders in front of her and pulls one out, and then she checks the list taped to the table in front of her.

“You’re all financially settled, right?” she asks, probably just so that Harry knows she’s not totally ignoring him.

Harry thinks of the many, many hours he spent rolling bread this summer and filling out scholarship applications last fall. “Yes,” he answers, with just enough cash left over to live on this semester. He’ll have to work over winter break, but he can manage it. The girl smiles and hands him a manila envelope, and Harry nods gratefully. He stops by the refreshment table on his way out, but the snacks are all gone.

He finds his new apartment after a couple of false alarms – he thought the brownstone beside his on Beacon St. was the one for him, and then he’d nearly panicked when the lock didn’t fit, and he got completely turned around once he thought he found his floor before he realized that the basement level must not have counted as a basement, and then he unlocks the door. It swings open to a dim apartment, still and unexpectedly quiet after the nonstop noise of the train and the loud hum of many voices in the move-in hall. Harry tightens his grip on the sweat-stained manila folder and heaves his suitcase over the threshold.

The whole apartment is hardly bigger than his bedroom back home and he has to share a bathroom with his next-door neighbor that’s only accessible by going back out to the hall. The east-facing windows mean he either needs to invest in some curtains or he’ll be up with the sun, and the fridge and dishwasher look to have about a hundred years between them.

Harry shimmies out of the jeans that have all but become glued to him with sweat, and then he throws himself across the bare mattress. The springs dig into his back, and the ceiling has a faint water stain on it. Harry closes his eyes and takes a deep, deep breath, so big it feels like it just might crack his ribs. Then he lets it out slow. He’s home.

 

***

 

The first two weeks of the semester pass in a blur of waking up early to catch the bus to his eight a.m. classes, scratching notes as fast as he can across his notebooks, and then rushing off to the next class to do it all again. He’s not sure if he feels so stupid because he’s learning so much, or because everybody else seems to find everything so much easier than he does.

He only gets the chance to eat once a day, so he usually camps out in the cafeteria halfway between his Poli-Sci course and the biology lab he couldn’t get out of. As long as he doesn’t leave, he can fill up his tray as many times as he wants, so he usually starts out with a salad and a cookie and then eats whatever they’re serving as an entrée today. Whatever is in BU cafeteria food has given him some real… _digestive trouble_ , but he already paid for the meal plan, so he can’t not make use of it.

Harry’s favorite place to study is under one of the elm trees on the quad in the middle of Comm Ave, where the trees weep red and gold leaves onto the sidewalk under buttery sunlight. He can’t help but feel a little like William Morris or Matthew Arnold, one of those old Victorian writers who wandered about a little in the poems they wrote, like they couldn’t very well tell a story without moving around in it.

He fails his first exam two weeks into his first semester. Well, technically it’s not a failing grade because he made a C on it, and that’s as good as failing if he hopes to get into law school someday. Harry lingers after class while the rest of his classmates file out, their desks scraping a little when they stand up and bump the battered wooden edges enough to push the desks a few inches over. They’re forever out of line, which still boggles Harry’s mind a little bit, when he thinks of his high school and the desks bolted into the floor.

The professor won’t let him retake the test. He just says to study harder for the next one, so that’s what Harry starts doing that very day. Harry plans to drag his heavy backpack to the green on Comm Ave, but the moment he steps out of the poli-sci building, the sky booms and cracks with a peal of thunder. Raindrops fall heavily onto the warm pavement outside with an audible splat. Shielding his backpack from the rain with his overshirt, Harry trucks it to Warren Towers for a to-go box of steaming hot fried rice, and then he races into Mugar Library just before the sky opens up and the rain comes down for real.

Harry saw the library with his mom on a campus tour last year when he was still filling out college applications, but he hasn’t had to spend any time in it yet. His apartment is quiet enough as it is that he doesn’t need to go out of his way for a bit of peace, and he’s always been a little bit intimidated by the towering shelves full of books. All this stuff that he’s meant to learn, and what if he can’t, or he’s not good enough somehow? It’s a silly thing to think when he’s at this very place to learn, but he can’t stop himself thinking of it, and his sneakers squeak echoingly in the grand entrance hall. 

The smell of books hits him first, that faintly dusty scent of old paper that always fills his head with a supreme quiet, like he’s in some sort of church. Then the smell of rain, mixing sweetly with paper like graham crackers and marshmallow crème, something a little dry and sweet that melts on the tongue. Harry heaves a huge breath, his lungs full to bursting with it.

Harry does a bit of tentative wandering around, his shoes echoing on the polished linoleum floor. He finds a staircase near the back of the building and chooses to climb on a whim, and he stops climbing when there stops being stairs to go up. He steps out of the stairwell and into a hallway made up of a tall bookshelf on one side and a row of study carrels on the other.

Harry swings his backpack off one shoulder, planning to settle down at the row of desks, and then spots another set of study carrels pushed up against the windows looking down on the roof of another building next door. Past the rooftop, there’s a sidewalk edged on either side with lush green grass, and beyond that, the high school that’s practically on BU’s campus. Harry vaguely remembers it even having BU’s name.

He slides his laptop out of his bag, pops the lid on his Styrofoam box full of steamed rice and veggies, and gets to work.

 

***

 

After that, the library becomes Harry’s favorite place on campus. His classes are all lectures, so mostly he sits quietly and takes notes, and then on days ending in _y_ he takes to his little study carrel and concentrates on transferring what he’s written with his meticulous, blocky handwriting onto his laptop. Gemma says that joining a study group is a great way to make friends, but so far, only the boy next to him has asked Harry to send him his notes because he missed class.

Being in college is different than being in school back home. Harry got into Brooklyn College Academy in eleventh grade so that he could start taking college classes before he graduated, and the classes were on the Brooklyn College campus, but he’s not a kid anymore, and the professors don’t treat them like children. Nobody brings in cookies or candy on Fridays, and they don’t watch movies sometimes so that the teachers’ classes stay on the same schedule.

It’s not worse, or anything, but it’s not the same, either. Homesickness hits Harry hard, like a punch to the gut, before September is even out. Even going to his favorite study carrel with a pocketful of cookies he smuggled out of the dining hall isn’t making him feel much better.

He misses the smell of his mom’s roast beef simmering on the burner when he got home from school, and the clink of Robin’s key in the dish when he got home, and even the way Olivia, Gemma’s old cat, used to sleep in the middle of his bed so that he had to curl up around her.

He misses other stuff, too, like the way his old room smelled, and the sound of Ian McKellan’s voice on bi-weekly _Lord of the Rings_ rewatches with Jonny and Matty and the other boys he used to play kickball in the street with, and the sweet _crack_ of a baseball bat smashing into a baseball for Brooklyn College’s team. He just played outfield, of course, because of the whole coordination thing, but still.

Halfway across the library, somebody laughs. The sound is surprisingly unfamiliar, and Harry catches himself raising his head, looking for whoever made it. There’s a boy with a baseball cap on supporting the Sox and a lanyard around his neck, and Harry recognizes him. They’re both here a lot, Harry to study, this boy because he seems to work here. He pushes a heavily-laden wooden trolley between towering rows of bookshelves to file books away. Harry watches him without meaning to. He learned to keep his head down at the public school he went to after – well, after things didn’t work out, and Brooklyn Academy was never the kind of place like in High School Musical, where people seemed to actually enjoy the time they spent there.

In some ways it was worse even than Harry’s college classes are, because at least now he’s made it. Back then, he was as desperate to get into a good school as any of the rest of them. Just, it doesn’t quite make for a Disney movie experience. Even though Harry has the full soundtrack committed to memory.

The library worker, who spots a head of rumpled russet hair and set of endearingly imperfect white teeth, laughs loudly. It’s a laugh like Gemma’s, one that’s laughing with you and not at you, and Harry’s heart aches worse, and less, at the same time. It hurts less than he expects.

“Sorry,” someone says, when he’s finally just convinced himself to bend his attention back to his notes. Harry looks up and finds the library worker with the brown hair and the smile. He catches himself smiling back and then he wonders what he must’ve done wrong to bring him over, and he starts pulling at his bottom lip so that he won’t say something stupid.

“Sorry?” Harry echoes.

"Yeah, I thought it was just me up here,” the library worker laughs. He offers Harry his hand. His palm is broad and square, and when Harry takes his hand, calloused and warm. “I’m Niall.”

Harry concentrates on enunciating, rather than the feel of this boy’s hand in his. It’s weird, maybe, but he’s not touched anyone since he was home, and he’s missed skin-to-skin contact. Like he’s one of those little monkeys in that experiment, and he’d rather have a mother to cling to than milk. Which is, like, weird, so – forget he said that.

"Harry,” Harry mumbles around his hand.

Niall nods. His hair is shaggy, covering the tops and sides of his ears, and Harry’s fingers suddenly itch to tuck his hair behind his ears. He looks like he smells good. “I’ve seen you around here quite a bit,” Niall says, so of course Harry starts wondering if he’s weird and freakish and nobody had the decently to tell him you’re not meant to spend so much time in your university library. “You must be really studious,” Niall goes on.

Harry could nod, but that would be bragging, sort of, wouldn’t it? Maybe he should just smile, instead? Or making a joke. He frowns and says, “Not as much as you _study us,_ ” and when Niall says nothing, Harry adds lamely, “That was a pun.”

“I figured,” Niall answers. “I was laughing, in my head.”

Harry can’t help but smile, and Niall beams back at him. Like a fly in a honey trap, Harry thinks, and tries not to feel pleased about it. “You do have a little fun every once in a while, right? If so, you should come to my birthday party. I don’t demand gifts but my friend who’s throwing the party, Louis, might tell you so. He’s joking, I promise.”

“Okay,” Harry says. He’s not sure what else to say. “Sure, can’t wait!” “Shall I RSVP by mail?” What is he, five years old, or his mother? Besides, he’s – he may not go, after all. He really does have to study a lot, and he got drunk with his childhood friends a few times before they all left for school but he’s seen Animal House and he doesn’t want to die of alcohol poisoning or worse, be arrested.

But he only has to go to one, and then he can say he’s done it. And deep down, from that quiet part of him that looks back at him in the mirror every morning and says _Don’t hunch your shoulder so much, raise your chin, be proud,_ he wants to go. “Alright,” Harry says, trying to infuse some more enthusiasm into his voice.

“Great,” Niall smiles. “I live in a house with my friends on Ivy Street, so drop by on Friday night.”

“Wait, but aren’t you going to give me your address?” Harry calls, when Niall has already turned back to his book truck.

Niall rolls his eyes. “Trust me, you’ll hear us long before you see us.”

Harry calls Gemma on Friday night to confer even though he promised himself at least eight times that he wouldn’t bother her. “You don’t get to snark,” he said darkly, his bag bumping into the backs of his legs on the walk home. A bus runs from campus to Fenway station, which is quite close to his apartment, but sometimes Harry just enjoys the walk. Especially on days like today, with the golden sun glinting off the tops of his sunglasses and making the blacktop street surface glimmer in the warm light.

“I’m not snarking,” says Gemma, who is definitely snarking. “I think it’s sweet, you calling to ask me about college protocol. You’re a baby,” she coos.

“I’m going to hang up on you,” Harry warns her, and she just laughs. They both know he doesn’t mean it.

“I’m sorry,” Gemma says anyway, because she’s kind like that. “What can I help you with?”

Harry pinches his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know. What time am I supposed to get there? What do I wear? Oh, I’m sorry, excuse me,” he tells the tiny elderly woman coming out of a bodega that he almost plowed over. “Should I even go at all? What if this turns out to be a fraternity bonding thing, and I end up taped to a flagpole?”

Gemma flat-out laughs. “Harry, love,” she says warmly.

“It’s silly, anyway,” Harry says. He stomps through a pile of leaves but they’ve not yet gone crispy and hard, they’re just soft and green. “To get attached, I mean. Who knows where I’ll end up for law school, _if_ I get in, right?”

“You’re still on about that, then,” Gemma murmurs. A rare note of skepticism enters her voice, and Harry breaks stride, stumbling over the curb. “Who knows what’ll happen, huh, baby?” she asks, sounding far too much like his mother. “Just take it one step at a time. Don’t show up before ten, don’t brush your hair, and don’t forget to put on deodorant. Okay?”

“Alright,” Harry mutters. “Thanks, Gemma.”

“Yup,” Gem says easily, and lets him go.

Harry spends the next six hours alternatively laying on his bed, staring blankly at his textbooks, and milling about his scanty kitchen for something to do. He could do the dishes: three cheap IKEA plates, his little clutch of tea mugs, and the bowl with dried muesli stuck to the inside.

He would go to the library and hole himself up at his study carrel with a Ziploc bag full of Fruit Loops and a copy of Pride and Prejudice illegally downloaded on his laptop, but he’s afraid of running into Niall and Niall rescinding his invitation or reminding Harry of it, he’s not sure which is worse. (Definitely the former.)

Ten thirty rolls around to Harry fretfully pulling at the collar of his button-up shirt. He’s decided to wear it open, over a wife beater, because that feels fashionable and trendy, and also he has no other ideas. He tries to look at his own butt in the tightest pair of jeans he’s got and then wonders what the hell he’s doing with his life, stretched up on his tiptoes with his neck cricking. Harry puts on deodorant, locks his apartment and stows the key in his pocket, and then he starts walking toward Ivy Street.

He watches his feet about as much as he watches his phone on the walk down narrow residential streets flourishing with trees in full autumnal bloom, which is to say, he almost face plants into the curb a few times. He can hear the party long before he sees it. The bass thumps throughout the neighborhood like a giant war drum beat in maddeningly slow time in an effort to frighten the opposing army, which Harry is not, but he kind of feels like he is. It’d have been nice to have a few drinks before coming out but he doesn’t have a fake ID or anything, so he’s stone cold sober, sweating like a sinner in church, and worrying over his bottom lip so hard it’s almost started bleeding.

When he follows the sound to the white clapboard house that’s positively jumping with bass reverb, he smiles at the people near the door. The smile feels familiar and not entirely real on his face; it’s his bakery-smile, his college-party smile, the one he got so good at at Brooklyn Academy when they’d done stuff like this to feel normal and instead just felt less so. It never struck him as lonely before, but it does now, when everyone else doesn’t have to try so hard.

Harry picks his way across the cramped living room jam-packed with bodies dripping neon paint under blacklights strung up across the ceiling toward the kitchen for a drink. He concentrates on dropping his shoulders and taking deep breaths, and he can smell sweat and alcohol on the air, the heady scent of horny young people. His veins fill with the faint buzzing, like feedback on the speakers blasting Usher from the roof, and Harry leans into it.

He grabs a classic red Solo cup and fills it half with Diet Coke, half with raspberry vodka, and drinks it all down in a matter of seconds. That’s the trick, is just to not let yourself taste it before you swallow. He still wrinkles his nose, fairly disgusted. He refills his cup, this time with much more Coke than vodka, and decides to look for Niall to wish him a happy birthday, and so that he’ll know that Harry came. That he tried. It feels bizarrely important, like he has something to prove, or maybe he just wants to make Niall happy. Show him that he was listening, that he wanted to show Niall he was heard.

Harry sips his vodka and Coke and pokes around the frat house. He jiggles bedroom doors and pokes his head in if they open, not least surprised when three bedrooms prove to be full of giggling coeds. Couples make out, fight, break up, and make up in the hallways between bedrooms, their voices slurring ever so slightly to the left or the right like Harry behind the wheel, so that he’s always having to make adjustments.

He, his mom, and Gemma used to always make a trip to Coney Island on Labor Day when Anne had a bank holiday, and she’d let them ride the rides until the breeze coming off the water got too cold, the sky too dark. Harry’s favorite was the carousel with the wonderfully painted horses. He’d sit astride the horse he came back to every time, the white one with the saddle and the hair like neopolitan ice cream, and wave to her like a little prince to make her laugh. Anne drove them home, their heads leaned into each other in the sandy back seat, and Harry would feel perfect. Amazing.

What a weird thing to think about now. He shakes his head to clear it, like he’s trying to fling the water out of his ears, and stumbles up to the tiny landing outside the third floor window. A creaky metal ladder leads up to the roof, and Harry sets his shoulders and proceeds to climb up, one harrowing step at a time. He tells himself not to look down until he forgets what he’s doing and looks down, and then he remembers that he’s drunk and clinging to a ladder that’s not attached to anything on a balmy night in the middle of September, all on his own in college, and then he gets the weirdest swoopy feeling in his stomach, like falling or flying, or maybe they’re the same thing.

He scurries the rest of the way up the ladder and rolls onto the roof like he’s just completed the Iditarod. Harry closes his eyes and imagines soft snow falling over him till he’s inside his own comfy, warm snow cave, and he might’ve dozed off if someone didn’t almost step on his face. He rolls over and stands up, and then he spots Niall in a flannel button-up standing near the edge of the roof with a group of handsome boys. If he was – if they were friends, it wouldn’t be weird for him to go over and say hi, happy birthday. It’d be normal, and welcome. Like Matty, or Jonny. And in some way, nothing like them. Harry walks over.

“Hey,” he says, his voice coming out a little froggy, syrupy, with alcohol.

"Harry!” Niall cries. Niall holds out his hand, and Harry hesitates for a moment, unsure what to do – a fist bump? Shake his hand? And Niall seizes his hand. He pulls Harry into a one-armed hug, the whole long length of his body pressed against Harry’s for a second, like he’s hugging Harry with his entire self. Harry can smell his detergent and his cologne, and he closes his eyes for a split second, just to take it in.

“Who’s this?” asks a bloke with sharp blue eyes and a sharper smile. He wears his hair with his fringe pushed off to one side and waxed into place, and he looks much older and much more secure than Harry, who bites his lip.

Niall puts his arm around Harry’s shoulders, holding him close, like a safety line. “This is Harry,” he says. “I found him in the library.”

“Always bringing home strays, you two!” another boy laughs, his whole face crinkling up with it. A dark-haired boy tucked into his side smiles with his tongue pushed up against the back of his teeth, and Harry’s heart aches, for some unknowable reason. It’s impossible not to tell that these must be good friends, not with the way their eyes constantly seek each other out. They’re like canaries in a coal mine, only each one of them is a canary, and they’re all checking to make sure they’re safe and happy. Harry’s throat feels tight for some reason.

A supersweet end-of-summer breeze rustles their clothes and blows the blue-eyed boy’s hair into his eyes. He impatiently resets it where it belongs. “I’m Louis,” he introduces himself. He jerks a thumb at the others. “This is Liam, my better half, and that’s Zayn, _his_ better half.”

Harry smiles nervously, which, for him, means smiling wide and happy. He’s seen Gemma do this to a group of boys during an Easter Egg hunt after Sunday school when he was just a little boy, and they had all taken note of her enough to swell their circle to include her. It’d worked for Harry, too, not at Brooklyn Academy but at the bakery, with the sweet old ladies. He’s hoping it’ll work now, and that he doesn’t look as nerve-wracked as he feels. It’s an awful thing, wanting to belong somewhere and realizing that that’s not up to you.

Louis sizes him up for a moment, his blue eyes like lasers, and then he tugs Harry out of Niall’s grasp. He checks Harry’s cup – empty, oops, he must’ve spilled it somewhere along the way – and takes it from him. He tosses the cup over the side of the roof and pushes a bottle of Jack Daniels into Harry’s hand in its place.

Liam’s face crinkles up again, and Zayn lets out a little laugh. That’s the last thing Harry remembers from that night, Zayn’s surprisingly goofy squeaky laugh rising into the late summer air, the sky peppered with bright stars shining down from above. 

 

***

 

“Oh, God,” Harry whispers, his voice cracked, before he’s even awake. His head gives an angry twinge in response, one that clearly says, “Shut up, I _hurt,_ ” so Harry whimpers and then falls silent. The mattress springs don’t creak when he rolls over onto his stomach, so Harry pretty quickly realizes he’s not at home.

He peels his eyes open, half-expecting a kidnapper to be wearing a black mask and stroking his beard – oh, wait, that wouldn’t work, would it, if he was wearing a mask? Wearing a half-mask, and stroking his beard. He’d say, “Well, well, well,” and Harry would have some clue as what was going on.

Instead, he just has a pounding headache, a mouth full of the taste of vomit, and his nose pressed to clean-smelling white sheets. He ducks his head down under the sheets and a simple blue comforter and smells himself. He smells like day-old sweat, cigarettes, and vomit, and Harry gags just thinking about how bad he needs a shower.

The room he’s in doesn’t look like a kidnapper’s dungeon or anything, though. It’s roughly the same size as Harry’s bedroom at home. The wooden floorboards are a little warped, but the floor looks clean. Certainly cleaner than Harry’s room, which is heaped with piles of dirty clothes and clean clothes, and sometimes he gets them confused.

An electric guitar leans against the chipped white wall in the corner, and a dark study lamp overlooks a neatly organized desk. There’s a Patriots poster on the wall, and three Greek letters on a pinion above the bed. The only other thing in the room is a wooden bureau with a few personal affects on: a pile of CDs, a heap of textbooks, and a dirt-stained baseball.

Harry’s jeans are folded neatly on the desk chair with his shirt. In spite of the fact that his mouth tastes like something died in it and his back is killing him, Harry slides out of bed and pads over to his clothes in just his underwear and socks. He puts his jeans and shirt back on, and then he realizes they smell funny. Not bad-funny, just different. Freshly laundered, he realizes. The gesture of kindness, however small, makes him sniffly. It’s probably just allergies. They can spontaneously develop, he had a health class in high school.

Harry slips his feet into his aged Converse, checks the phone on the desk – yes, it’s his, although it’s dead – slips it into his pocket, and pokes his head into the hallway. It’s empty save for a tea-stained carpet and an unevenly-hanging curtain rod, so he tiptoes out in search of the stairs. He’s so busy concentrating on not tripping or stepping on a creaky stair that he doesn’t hear the voices until he’s already four feet from the bottom of the stairs, where he’s easily within sight of everyone.

Harry raises his head slowly. Four people still seemed to be passed out around the living room: on the battered brown couch, the woven rug, and the carpet. But gathered loosely around the living room anyway are last night’s survivors, Niall and Louis amongst them. Niall’s sat on the edge of the ottoman with an acoustic guitar in his lap, leading the rest of them in a singalong. Harry pauses halfway between the stairs and the front door, wondering what to do. Should he go?

Niall glances over his audience’s heads and catches Harry’s eye, and Harry shuffles around the side of the couch. Niall smiles, bending his head back down over his guitar, and plays another song.

 

***

 

“Sorry about,” Harry starts later, up to his wrists in soapy water with Niall stationed beside him at the sink. He spent the afternoon helping Zayn boil spaghetti for his turn making dinner for the frat, and it’d come out pretty good, he thinks. Just enough garlic and salt and his secret ingredient: lemon juice. Zayn loved that.

The frat house was a busy beehive of activity all day; the screen porch at the front of the house banged open with the wind every time someone came or left like nature’s percussion. Eventually Niall put the guitar away and everybody who hadn’t straggled home helped bag the empty beer bottles and red cups lying around the party the night before.

He’s tried to help, but only because it’d been fun to get Zayn trust him enough to sample his pasta sauce, and Liam made a game out of tossing garbage into black plastic bags as if they were playing basketball. Harry’s missed people, maybe. More than he knew.

“Sorry about making you take care of me at your own birthday party,” Harry blurts out so that he won’t hem and haw and blush from saying it. “I’m just – proper embarrassed, I’m so sorry.”

Niall takes the fresh clean plate from him and towels it dry. A vague memory comes back to Harry as he watches Niall’s smooth, proficient strokes: Niall’s firm but gentle hands smoothing back his hair and rubbing his back while he puked his guts out into Niall’s toilet the night before. Harry goes from embarrassed to mortified in a hot second.

Laughing, Niall says, “No, no, that was my fault. I knew Louis and them would give you too much to drink. Hey, but it was honestly impressive how much you managed to put down.” He pokes Harry, gently, in the stomach. “You must have a hollow leg.”

“Ugh, God,” Harry says, thinking of puking it all up later. “Did you have a miserable time, though? Honestly. It was really shitty of me if you did.”

Niall pretends to think about it. Or maybe he really is thinking about it, Harry can’t tell. “Why’d you stick around today? You didn’t have to.”

“Oh, I’m – I’m sorry,” Harry starts, and Niall cuts him off with a warm palm to Harry’s arm.

“Not like that,” Niall says. He goes back to drying dishes. “Just, if you stick around the boys are like to think you’re going to keep coming round. Don’t want them to think that if it’s not true.”

“Depends,” Harry says. “You want me around after I ruined your birthday? I figured you saw enough of me in that library.”

Niall looks Harry over consideringly. “First time I saw you, you weren’t even studying, you know?”

“No?” Harry asks, suddenly mindful of the fact that he’s just been standing still, that maybe he’s been staring at the way Niall’s mouth moves when he talks. Harry knows what Niall sounds like when he sings, so all of his words come out reverberating slightly in the air, like his chest is an amplifier. The effect makes him surprisingly easy to talk to, like Harry doesn’t have to talk at all. It’s enough to listen.

“No, you were – you were doing this thing I normally hate, tapping your fingers on the desk. And humming. Just struck me as kind of weird, you know? Don’t get very many people humming in the library.”

Harry smiles fit to swallow the sun. Niall looks away first.

“Come back anytime,” Niall says, leaning against the doorjamb. The open collar of his flannel shirt pulls to the side, showing his pale soft collarbone and a spray of freckles dotting the side of his neck, like chocolate shavings on ice cream. “Open door policy around here.”

“Thank you,” Harry says, hoping Niall understands how much he means it. How many things.

Niall nods. “Anytime.”

 

***

 

Harry doesn’t really mean to take Niall up on his offer – or he can’t think of a good enough reason to drop by, and he’s nervy about going back to the library in case Niall asks why he hasn’t been round – until he trips going up the steps to his poli-sci class and spills coffee all down his front. He’s so out of sorts for the rest of the period that he positively flunks a pop quiz, and his notes are half-hearted at best.

Louis and Zayn are sat outside on the steps when Harry finds Niall’s house again. He has a very vague memory of arriving at nighttime, and the smell of barbecue smoke and sweet end-of-summer blues on the starry night air. Now autumn has settled in and brought with it the smell of rotting leaves and coffee, like every percolator in town is powering on against the incoming winter.

“Heya, lad,” Zayn says, holding his fist out for Harry to bump. Harry does, his knuckles brushing Zayn’s heavy gold class ring. “Oh, sorry,” he says, putting his cigarette in his mouth for safekeeping so he can offer Harry his other hand.

“Fancy,” Harry observes astutely. It’s been a shit day.

“It’s Liam’s,” Zayn mumbles around the cig, his dry tone not quite covering his terribly pleased he is.

“What are you doing here?” Louis asks, the sun glinting off his blue eyes.

Harry shrugs. “Niall around?”

Louis checks his wrist. He’s not wearing a watch. “Eh, probably soon,” he answers. “His shift at the library will be up in like half an hour. Want to play a round of Halo with us?”

“Sure,” Harry shrugs.

“You are literally the shittiest Halo player I’ve ever met,” Louis says in disbelief. Zayn blows Harry up with the grenade launcher again.

“I’m trying,” Harry mumbles, shaking the controller around like it’s leading him. “I just can’t, like. What’s it doing? Is mine broken?”

“It doesn’t even have to be?” Louis laughs. He takes the lit cig from Zayn’s mouth and pops it in his own, Zayn’s only response a swift punch to the leg. Louis leans back into their brown cotton sofa, the corners of his mouth curled up, impossibly fond. “Want a hit?” he asks.

Harry shakes his head. “Asthma,” he answers.

“Good boy,” Zayn says. He takes another Marlboro out of a battered pack from his pocket. “These things will kill you.”

“Idiot,” Niall says, surprising all three of them. They turn as one to find Niall framed in the doorway, one corner of his mouth pulled up higher than the other. He drops his bag by the door and plucks the cigarette out of Zayn’s mouth. He puts it out on their scarred coffee table and tucks it behind Zayn’s ear, and Zayn pats his hand. “Hey,” he says, noticing Harry. His smile dips into a frown. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just,” Harry starts lamely. He’d almost forgotten, he’d been so distracted, but reality crashes down on him like waves onto the Long Island shore when Robin appeared in their lives and started trying to win favor from Gemma and Harry. The whole family went, plus Robin, separate from “family” at the time. Harry had been up to his neck in salty sea water, enjoying the way the slimy seaweed brushed against the soles of his feet, when suddenly the seaweed dropped away, and he was being sucked out to sea.

Niall says, “Okay,” like Harry said something meaningful. “Come up to my room, yeah? I’ll bring him back in a minute, boys,” he tells Louis and Zayn. Niall runs his fingers through Zayn’s soft dark hair when he’s done collecting his backpack, and Zayn leans his head into Niall’s palm. Louis pretends to bite his hand when Niall tries to pat his face and Niall pulls his fingers away, laughing.

Niall opens the door to his room and goes straight to his bed, where he flops down, bouncing a little on the mattress. He sits up enough to struggle out of his flannel shirt, and then he kicks the comforter down till he can pull it up over himself.

“Nap?” he offers Harry, like that’s a perfectly normal thing. So Harry sits down on the edge of the bed to unlace his Converse, and then he slides beneath the covers next to Niall. The smell of him is overwhelming, and Harry thinks fondly of that morning he woke up here. “I had a shit day,” Niall sighs.

Harry blinks. He didn’t know Niall had shit days. As if somehow that light he carried around inside of him would keep them at bay, like the nightlight Harry had on his wall until he left for college. “What happened?”

“Just – nothing. What happened with you?” Niall asks.

Harry doesn’t want to press, so he says, “Just, everything went wrong. I don’t know.”

“And you came here?” Niall asks.

“Yeah. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” Niall says, his voice so light. “Sure,” he says again. “You want to be big spoon or little spoon?”

Harry pretends not to notice Niall’s socked feet seeking his out under the covers. “Little spoon,” he laughs.

“Perfect. I like big spoon.” He nudges at Harry’s shoulder till Harry rolls over. Niall is a couple of inches shorter than Harry, so his forehead fits neatly into the juncture between Harry’s neck and shoulder. He runs his hand just once over Harry’s side, like he’s smoothing him down, making him soft. Niall squeezes Harry’s hip before he lets go.

“We fit,” Harry observes sleepily.

Niall makes a wordless sound of agreement, and within minutes, Harry’s out.

 _Is it weird to take a picture of him while he’s asleep?_ Harry thinks about texting Gemma. He can already imagine her response. _Yes, very weird_ , so he doesn’t do it. It’d be nice to, though, Harry thinks. He woke up maybe ten minutes ago to Niall splayed out over the bed, his ankle hooked over Harry’s shin. He sleeps with his hands curled neatly beneath his chin, his lips ever so slightly parted, and Harry lets himself think it. _Pretty._ Even that doesn’t quite cover it.

 _Good._ Yeah, that seems right. He wants to touch the quivering tips of his eyelashes and trace the shape of his eyebrows with his fingertips, and the slightly downward curve of Niall’s mouth. Harry wants to sink his fingers in his hair and kiss him until he’s red-faced and panting beneath him, and then he wants to kiss him some more.

Between one slow blink and the next, Niall wakes up. “Harry?” he asks blearily.

His hoarse voice calling Harry’s name sends shivers down his spine. He should stop while he’s ahead, Harry thinks, even though he knows he won’t. “Morning,” he says.

Niall closes his eyes again. “It ain’t really morning, is it?”

“No, it’s like eight o’clock at night.”

“Bet the boys ate dinner without us,” Niall sighs.

“They’re all in your fraternity?”

Niall nods without opening his eyes. “Delta Lambda Phi, yeah. We met when we were freshman and Louis was a sophomore. He’s a senior now. His girlfriend used to help with the rent, but, uh. Yeah, so Z moved in to help. Even though he sleeps in Liam’s room ‘less they’re fighting.”

Harry wrinkles his nose. “What do they fight about?” he wonders.

Niall snorts out a laugh. He rolls onto his back, his voice sounding more awake the more he talks. “Who wore their favorite shirt last, most often. Or who wore it better, ‘s hard to tell.”

Harry muffles his giggle into his arm. His head keeps slipping off the side of Niall’s narrow pillow and his bed is that awful, awkward size halfway between a twin and a queen that you only ever find on college campuses, and Harry feels safe and warm. Niall’s face is sharp and clean in profile, his nose bumpy as though he must’ve broken it somewhere along the way, and right after he swallows, he purses his lips a little.

“You’re doing it again,” Niall whispers.

“What?” Harry asks, dropping his voice to a whisper to match.

Niall turns his head to look at him. “Humming,” he says, a smile creeping over his face.

Harry hides his face in the pillow that smells so much like Niall. “God. God, okay. If I tell you a secret, will you keep it – will you keep it a secret?”

“Yes,” Niall says solemnly, with that voice like an amplifier again.

“I, like. Sometimes I write poems? Used to. Sometimes I used to. I don’t know, don’t – it’s whatever. But, uh, if I need to find the right word or whatever. I was in a garage band with my friends in middle school, it was _terrible,_ don’t laugh,” Harry says, even as a little thrill goes through him when Niall’s hair slides against the pillow, his head tilting back with the laugh.

“I’m not laughing at you,” Niall assures him. His hand finds Harry’s forearm. The tips of his calloused fingers are coarse on Harry’s soft skin.

“Yeah, so,” Harry murmurs. “Music and writing, there’s not much difference.”

Niall strokes Harry’s arm with his thumb. “Could I read some of them sometime? Your poems, I mean.”

Harry squeaks, “No!” before he remembers that his voice does that. Then he clears his throat. “No, no. No, never.”

“So someday, then,” Niall says. He rolls onto his side to face Harry, his grin as crookedly hung across his face as the posters tacked up on Harry’s wall. Niall slides his warm dry palm under Harry’s curls to cup the back of his neck. He’s still laying on his bed, and his expression is too full of meaning to be readable, like Harry’s zoomed in on one of those composite images of someone’s face that are made up of hundreds of other pictures.

Harry kisses him. He rushes in a little too fast and bumps his nose against Niall’s cheek, so he puts his thumb on Niall’s bottom lip to know where to aim. He tastes like sleep, and his lips are dry and chapped. Harry presses his mouth to Niall’s for two, three seconds, and then he pulls back to assess Niall’s reaction. “Sorry, I just – I was afraid you were going to kiss me, and I wanted to kiss you first.”

“Why?”

Harry shrugs. “I dunno.” He traces the line of Niall’s cheek with his finger. Not nearly everything he wants, but as much as he’ll dare take. It was such a little kiss, hardly even anything, and Harry’s heart is racing. “I think if you proper kissed me, I’d die,” he vows. Niall smiles at the mock seriousness in his voice, although to be honest, Harry’s not sure he’s joking. “Honest,” he says anyway. “My heart would just _pop_ , and I’d die.”

Niall hasn’t moved. His face smooshes into the pillow a little so that he looks goofy and silly and there’s a candyfloss pink flush creeping up his cheeks and his hairline is getting a little sweaty, and he’s beautiful. Intimidatingly so, even. Harry curls his fingers around the blankets, his palms a little damp. “Would it be worth it?”

“For you?” Harry hums thoughtfully. Then he realizes that he’s humming again, so he pulls the blankets up over his face, trying his best to disappear from sight. When he peeps over the comforter, Niall’s still there waiting for him, the same easy smile on his face.

“C’mon,” says Niall. He starts wriggling across the mattress, pushing Harry out of bed. “I’m starvin’.”

They find Louis and Zayn and Liam passing a blunt around downstairs. Liam is sat on the floor between Zayn’s pencil-thin legs, and he keeps rubbing the stubble on his jaw against Zayn’s jeans like some kind of happy cat. Harry catches Louis’s eye and makes a face, and Louis bursts out laughing, smoke leaking out of his mouth with every breathy cackle. Two empty pizza boxes are open in front of them.

“Didn’t save us nothing?” Niall asks, leaning over the back of the sofa to grab the spliff from Louis. “Assholes,” he says fondly.

“Have you ever been high before?” Louis asks Harry. He’s from _New York City,_ of course he’s been high. Just usually on prescription stuff, the pills that his classmates shake out of the orange bottles their parents hid in the bathroom cabinet or in the bedside table drawer. Clinical high.

So Harry shakes his head. “Not marijuana,” he says carefully.

“C’mere, Louis, man, shotgun it to him,” Liam cajoles. He twists in his spot between Zayn’s skinny legs, blinking his big brown eyes up at Harry. “It sucks the first time otherwise.”

“Like most things,” Zayn says, wrinkling his nose when he laughs. For some reason Zayn’s laughter is enough to get Harry moving over to Louis, who pats the arm of the couch. Harry glances over to Niall, who looks nothing but amused, his pale arms poking out the sleeves of an oversized tank top. He folds his arms across his chest, which only has the effect of drawing Harry’s attention to them, so he looks away.

Louis is very close when Harry looks down at him. He puts his hands on either side of Harry’s face and draws Harry’s mouth down to his. Louis squeezes Harry’s head like he’s a lump of dough, so Harry opens his mouth, and Louis blows in a thick stream of marijuana smoke.

Harry must do it wrong, because the smoke catches in the back of his throat and he reels back from Louis’s face hacking. He keeps coughing long after all the smoke must be out of his lungs, and he’s just starting to wonder whether he’s having an asthma attack when Niall thrusts a glass of water into his hands.

“Try not to kill him next time, Lou, geez,” he says softly. Niall watches Harry like a hawk till he manages to gulp down half the glass. Niall squeezes the back of Harry’s neck, his thumb digging into the tense muscles, and then he shifts away.

“Freshman,” Liam coos, when Niall has moved safely out of earshot. Harry aims him a kick and gets Zayn instead, who shoots Harry the dirtiest look he’s ever gotten.

One of the straps of Louis’s tank top is sliding down his arm, and he has tan lines up to his feet from wearing skater shoes all summer. When he puts his hand on Harry’s shoulder, though, Harry snaps to attention. “You’ll be careful with him or I’ll let you choke next time, you understand?” he asks.

Harry fishmouths for a long moment. Harry, careful with Niall? All Niall has to do is ask him to stop coming round and Harry would probably cry, this is so far and away his favorite place to be. And so far, all he’s done with Niall is get wasted at his birthday party and throw up in his toilet.

But Niall let him come back.

“Okay,” Harry murmurs.

Louis’s grin unfurls slow across his face. “Have you ever thought of rushing?”

“What, for a fraternity?” Harry laughs.

“Why are you laughing?” Liam demands. Zayn just crosses his ankles over Liam’s chest when Liam tries to move away, so Liam sends Harry a fierce puppy dog face. In the kitchen, Niall keeps banging around opening and closing cabinets. He’s warbling a Jackson 5 song as he goes, shimmying his hips to “ _Oh,_ baby, give me one more chance…”

Harry shakes his head. “Not like that. Just, I’m pre-law. I don’t think I’d have the time.”

Of course they all fall about shrieking about pre-law, so smart, ooh! Till Harry feels properly chastened. He knows he’s smiling so hard his dimples are deep lines in his face, but he can’t bring himself to stop. Already part of him can’t wait to tell Gemma about today.

Later, when the boys shift to give Harry room on the couch and Niall’s sitting criss-cross applesauce on the coffee table with plates of steaming stir fry in their laps, Zayn murmurs to Harry, “I’m in fine arts. I didn’t think I’d have the time, either, so I didn’t rush when they did. You find the time, though, like.” He strokes the back of Liam’s ear and Liam makes like he’s going to swat his hand away, laces their fingers together instead. “You find the time for your brothers, man.”

“Give me your number before you go,” Niall says. Harry’s stood on the front porch, the wind whistling through the mesh screen. It’s just a few short blocks home, though, and if Harry runs, he’ll warm up quick. And then he can sit at his desk and do homework for the next three or four hours, sleep for three hours, and wake up in time for a shower before class. His body aches just thinking of it.

“Sorry, I’d have let you know I was coming over if I had your number,” Harry starts. He always feels rudeness in the center of his chest, same place he feels guilt. Like he’s disappointed his mom somehow.

Niall shakes his head. “So you can text me when the day goes to shit, alright?”

“You too,” Harry says. He pauses. “Did yours get any better?”

Niall studies his expression for a moment. Goosebumps have emerged on his skin in the brisk wind blowing in from the northeast, and his hair is a bed-rumpled mess. Harry smiles. “Yeah,” Niall mumbles. “Text me when you get home, okay?”

Harry just nods, and then he makes himself turn and push the screen door open and step outside so that he won’t just stand on the front porch looking at Niall until Niall shuts the door. That would be weird, which Harry is definitely trying not to be.

He gets into his quiet, still apartment. The door creaks a little when it’s three-fourths of the way open, and then it falls silent again. Somehow, even though Harry is alone, the apartment feels less lonely than when he was thinking about coming home after class.

Maybe it’s that he can imagine Louis standing on the armchair he dragged in off the street after he inevitably loses a round of Halo against Zayn, and Zayn and Liam squished together on the blue microfiber couch he bought from his next-door roommate when she dropped out to go on a cross-country hiking trip two weeks into the semester. Niall in the middle of it, imperturbable. He’ll look like he belongs.

 

***

 

Niall’s _Could I read some of them sometime? Your poems, I mean,_ rattles around in Harry’s head like whatever Neville forgot to remember in the Remembrall. Shaking it doesn’t make the forgetting go away, same as Harry can’t stop thinking about it. Of course he said no, they’re so _personal._ But, like. But if Niall liked them. It’s just, Harry wrote them, so he doesn’t know if they even make sense to anyone else, if they express what he wanted to them to feel so that he could make that connection with someone else even if he didn’t know them.

So that he could make a connection with himself, even when even he doesn’t quite know what he’s on about, probably. Harry takes his planner out along with his notebook and leaves it open on the desk in the biology class he couldn’t exempt out of. The faces around him have become familiar over the last few weeks, and he nods hello to the ones he’s had a quick minute-long chat with before class starts before. He should talk to them more. Maybe they could even be a study group so that he doesn’t flunk out.

Harry doodles a tiny swarm of bumblebees into the margin of his notebook until a line of verse drops into his head like a sudden realization, and then he writes it in his planner, almost like he’d plotted to have it open and ready.

Silly. Childish. Harry’s going to be a lawyer; he doesn’t have time for stuff like this. He’s only got a year of basics and then he goes into the hard classes and he might graduate early, but that’s only an undergraduate degree, and he needs at least a 3.8 to get into law school. He doesn’t have time for hobbies.

And then he figures out what the next line is, and the next, till his planner is full of scribbled verse and he hasn’t taken a single note all class.

“Could I copy your notes? Sorry, I, uh, couldn’t see.”

“Sure,” the girl beside him agrees easily.

She reopens her notebook and lets Harry take a couple of grainy iPhone pictures with his dubious camera and then, because he’s feeling brave, Harry asks, “A study group might be nice for a class like this, yeah?”

“Gosh, yes,” she says, suddenly way more interested. “I wrote down every word he said and I’m still, like? What did he just say?” she laughs. “My friend Jesy, she was absent today but she’ll need the notes, as well. Maybe we could, like, try and figure it out together?”

“Are you guys talking about a study group?” the boy who sits behind Harry asks. He rubs the back of his neck self-consciously. “Could I, like, get in on that?”

Harry helps the girl from his class, Jade, collect everybody’s phone numbers, and by the end of the afternoon, he has a group chat going and a study session planned for the next Wednesday in the library. Harry drops by Mugar on his way home to reserve them a private room, which is his excuse for going to see Niall.

“Well, well, well,” Niall says when he sees him. “If it isn’t BU’s next young Wordsworth.”

Harry grimaces. “I hate Wordsworth.”

“Me, too,” Niall agrees. “How about Lord Byron, eh?” He adjusts the brim of his baseball cap, the cotton faded and torn a little at the front of the brim. Niall leans against his heavy wooden book truck in the middle of Periodicals, his smile warm.

“Is that the only other poet you know?”

“Uh, no,” Niall says. “I also know you, _duh,_ ” he aims a kidney jab at Harry. Harry, who has spent more than two hours with Louis, jumps back instinctively and almost goes down when he trips over his own feet. So much for ever looking like not a mess. Harry laughs at himself, the cackle high and sharp, and then he claps a hand over his mouth.

Niall looks at him consideringly. The lanyard around his neck makes a soft sound when it drops onto the book truck between them, Niall leaning in to ask conspiratorially, “Want to see something sick?”

They wheel the book truck into the corner and then Niall leads Harry to the echoing stairwell at the back of the library. He takes the stairs two at a time, his skinny legs surprisingly strong. Harry trips a few times watching his muscles flex in his unseasonable cargo shorts.

Niall leads him to the basement, where he unlocks a door with the keycard around his neck. He ushers Harry in quick so Harry follows, and his heart beats wildly in his chest for a moment, standing in total darkness with Niall breathing fast nearby, a laugh caught in the middle of his chest. Then Niall turns the lights on, and he finds himself standing in a projection room lined on all sides with locked cases filled floor-to-ceiling with DVDs.

“Harry,” Niall starts solemnly. “Important question. Have you ever seen the greatest movie ever made?”

“Um,” Harry says. “Probably not.”

Niall clucks disapprovingly and moves to a case halfway across the room, his battered Supras squeaking a little on the polished tile floor. He selects a black DVD case from the cabinet and carries it over to the array in the middle of the room. Auditorium seats flank the array on all sides, curving around the tiny theatre and marching up to the white screen at the front.

“Niall,” Harry whispers. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“I’ll stay late,” Niall answers. “This is more important.”

Ten minutes into the movie, Harry whispers, “Niall.” Niall hushes him. “Niall,” Harry tries again. Niall flaps his hand at Harry so Harry traps it under his arm. Niall looks at him with surprise, and delight.

“You learn fast,” he compliments. “That or Louis’s evil is spreading.”

“This is a golf movie,” Harry feels compelled to say.

“It’s the greatest film ever made,” Niall says patiently. “ _The Greatest Game Ever Played._ ‘All I want is a chance.’ No?”

Harry’s helpless to the smile on his face. “Okay. Just checking.”

“What, you don’t golf?” Niall looks aghast.

“No,” Harry lies. “What, you do?”

“Oh, my God,” Niall says. “I have to take you putt-putting.”

Harry grins. “Alright.”

Niall relaxes back in his seat like that settles it. His arm is pressed up against Harry’s, and his skin is warm despite the frigid cold of the library. Feeling brave, Harry twists his hand over the top of Niall’s so that he can take it. Niall just flips his palm up, weaving their fingers together.

They go putt-putting that weekend in spite of the drizzling rain with Zayn and Louis and Liam and some of the other lads from the frat who invited themselves along, and the only person who beats Harry is Niall.

           

***

 

Two weeks into October, Niall texts Harry while he’s sat in Middle English Literature. Harry opens his phone under the desk, trying to eyeball the screen without being too obvious. He’d hate for the professor to catch him because he loves this class and the way the Middle English letters roll off his tongue like rocks down the side of a steep hill. He’s probably being entirely obvious.  _Busy tonite?_

 _Not for you,_ Harry types first. He bites his lip, deletes the text, and writes,  _Mb, ??_

 _Great come for coffee_ , Niall sends back, followed by an address.

Harry has to sit on his hands to keep from obsessively checking his phone for another message from Niall all the way through lecture. He rings him as he rushes across campus for his next class, bumping into other co-eds. “You aren’t having me over for some kind of poetry slam, are you?”

Niall laughs out loud. “No, I reckon you get enough o’ that in that journal you’re always toting around.”

Harry bites his lip as he smiles, watching the curb under his feet. Autumn leaves, more soggy and brown than red and gold, are piled up against the side of the curb in the gutter, and Harry shivers preemptively. “Alright then, so what is it?”

Niall sighs long-sufferingly. “What does it matter what it is, you prat? You’re going to drink excessive amounts of coffee and talk some shit with me, ‘m not going to embarrass ya.”

“Fine. But you’re buying,” Harry makes Niall promise, trotting up the stairs to the science building.

“Yeah, yeah,” Niall laughs, ringing off.

Harry has to zip his phone into an inner pocket of his backpack just so that he won’t fidget with it for the rest of the day. He ping-pongs back to the English building for his last class of the day in one of the bigger rooms, one hundred or so students arranged in a semi-circle around the lecturer at a podium.

His stomach’s rumbling by the time the professor lets them out, shouting next week’s reading assignment at their backs as they pack up and file out. So Harry stops on the way to the coffeehouse to write down the assignment before he forgets and to grab a greasy sleeve of French fries from the student union building.

He munches the French fries on his way to the Cantab Lounge, the coffee shop that Niall texts him about, biting them out of the package so that he can thumb through his Instagram and Twitter feeds. He has to take the Blue line to get to the coffee shop, so he queues up with some vaguely familiar-looking people at the bus stop.

Harry pulls up Facebook on a whim. Everybody’s mom is on the site now so it’s not nearly as much fun as it used to be, but he likes to look at the news that’s trending. He doesn’t often have the time or the energy to read the articles, but if he just reads the headlines then he can nod and restate it in some way. Let Niall believe he’s done his research, maybe. Or prompt Niall to tell him more, even if Harry spends most of the time studying Niall’s face.

At the top of his feed are the usual announcements, and Harry half-interestedly scrolls through them. Today is Alice’s birthday. Harry stops short, because – because he’d forgotten, somehow. Christ. They used to start begging their parents to take them to the zoo or Coney Island for ages before her birthday. They spent all of her birthdays together, actually, and now…

Harry looks at the innocuous little text box.  _Want to wish Alice a happy birthday?_ An acquaintance she met at one school social could send her the very same thing. There’s nothing…it’s like they don’t know each other, like he doesn’t know at least half the things she’s ever said or have their shared past tattooed on himself in the shape of a scar on his knee that time he fell out of a tree or the one on his forehead from running into the kitchen door at her mum’s house.

 _Happy birthday Al_ , he types. He considers adding more, but he’s not sure what to say. How to say it without spending the rest of his life trying to fit it all in, what it’d been like to grow up with her, how much he used to look forward to those birthdays now that they hardly know each other at all. In the end, he adds,  _love always,_  and sends it off.

Harry’s still a little shaken when the bus deposits him three blocks over and two blocks up from Niall’s coffee shop. Harry checks himself out in the windows of the shops he passes by, a defunct convenience store, a barber shop, a candy store that looks like it’s seen better days. His hair is pushed up off his forehead and his nose isn’t too greasy, but he still looks like he’s growing into himself. His legs are too long and his body’s still soft in places even though he’s started running with Liam almost every night.

 _That’s what all that charm is for,_  Harry’s mum would say, ruffling his hair. Harry snorts and rolls his eyes and smiles to himself, making a note to call her tomorrow and catch up. Last he talked to her she mentioned wanting to get a trim herself and he wants to find out how it went. Half the time she says that and she comes back from the salon with her hair a different color.

The Cantab Lounge has a white stone façade and a green awning stretched above the door with the name spelled out in the same font as the Ford and Coca-Cola logos. Harry takes a picture before he goes inside to find Niall because he doesn’t very well need to give Niall more stuff to tease him about. Besides, he wants to have the picture edited the way he wants before he shows it to Niall later.

The Lounge turns out not to be so much a coffee shop as it is a bar, with a gaggle of tiny tables in the middle of the floor and a bar stretched off to one side. On the other side, there’s a tiny stage with a microphone. A guitarist warbles something ineligible behind the mic, his voice soothing, for all that.

“Oy!” Niall greets him from a tiny table when Harry steps over the threshold, the bell tinkling behind him. Harry ambles over to his table and sits down carefully, making sure not to hit any unsuspecting civilians with his bag or his elbows as he takes it off over his head and slings the strap around the back of the chair, his faded green canvas bag sagging on the floor.

As always, seeing Niall’s face makes Harry’s heart do a little flip in his chest, and he smiles nervously and pushes his hair back. Niall nudges a coffee cup over to him, and Harry peers over the rim to see. “Black coffee?”

“Oops, that must be mine,” Niall says, taking the coffee back and pushing the other cup over to Harry. His is in a mug with whipped cream and chocolate drizzle on top, and Harry looks up with a beaming smile. “Niall.”

“I know how you are,” Niall grins.

“I don’t know how you drink it black,” Harry comments. Finding something to talk about with Niall is always easy. Not telling him how great that freckle on his earlobe is or how great his stubble is when it catches the muted light of the inside of this coffee house, however, is harder.

Niall shrugs comfortably. “My granddad was in the Irish Army back in the day. Said he had to get used to it black because they weren’t likely to have sugar or cream lying about, so I would go and sit with him…” Niall trails off. That’s another thing Harry likes about Niall, that he knows when to let a story go. Not that it’s not interesting, but that it is, like he knows Harry will enjoy imagining Niall sat in a creaky rocking chair beside his wizened grandfather, sat in an equally creaky rocking chair.

“D’you think you’ll go home for the Christmas holiday?” Harry asks, licking the foam mustache off his upper lip.

“Might,” Niall answers. “Might like to. The rest of my family’s here in Boston, though, so. Don’t know that I can swing a ticket,” he admits, absent-mindedly tracing his finger over the lacquered wooden tabletop. Harry makes a sympathetic noise, and Niall grimaces, “Yeah, but, you know. That’s the way it goes.”

Harry watches Niall talk about his classes and his favorite football team, and he thinks about what Niall’s just said.  _That’s the way it goes._  “Harry,” Harry wakes up to Niall saying, realizing he’s just been staring at Niall without blinking. “I know my geology class is interesting, but it’s not that interesting.” He reaches across the table and presses the back of his hand to Harry’s forehead. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t, just,” Harry starts, and Niall draws his hand away. “I really like you? I mean, like. I don’t know,” Harry bites his lip. He feels a little like he’s all the way back in elementary school, when he’d just walk up to a kid who looked his own age and ask, “Want to be best friends?” and if he or she said yes, then they were off. It feels a little like peeking behind the curtain at the Wizard to talk about how special a new friendship feels. Like he needs to let it grow on its own without interfering too much. “Just, I want –”

Niall nods like he already knows what Harry’s going to say. “We’re on the same page, Haz. Don’t worry.” His eyes are so blue, textured like mountains just after sunset before the light’s all the way gone. The blue hour, someone called it. Some French guy.

The lights go down, and then all the way back up, and Harry finally notices other people besides Niall. There’s an awful lot of young adults, Harry notices. Mostly dressed in black. Mostly…mostly holding notebooks. A bell chimes, and a bloke taps on a microphone. “Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our weekly open mic poetry slam. Our first poet is…” and Harry groans.

“You didn’t,” he tells Niall. Niall says nothing, so Harry’s heart starts to feel like a balloon filling with helium, except instead of helium it’s fear. “Niall, tell me you didn’t.”

Niall leans forward in his seat, his hand warm and dry and shaking a little on top of Harry’s. Or maybe Harry’s is trembling. “If you don’t want to do it, I’ll go up for you, yeah? Make a right ass of myself. Or we can just go. But,” he says.

“But what?” Harry whispers.

"What if you’re good?”

It’s such a simple, awesome, terrifying question. Harry sits down in his seat in mute horror. Doing anything feels like doing too much. Leaving would make a big statement, dumping out his backpack and sticking his head inside feels like revealing too much, hoping hard enough that the floor will swallow him whole just isn’t working.

He’s done this before, is the thing. Gotten up in front of a group of people and put on a show, like he’s fourteen again and performing with White Eskimo, before he ever messed things up with them. Harry doesn’t know how to tell Niall that he doesn’t like the person that needs that kind of public adoration.

Alice’s voice echoes in his mind. “You care more about what a room full of strangers think than about the few of us that actually love you,” and he can’t do it. The room erupts into applause after every three-minute performance; it sounds like the crack and peal of thunder and lightning, or gunfire, and Harry puts his head down on the wooden table, wanting to go up, wanting to not want to go up.

When his name is called, Niall puts his hand on the back of Harry’s neck, obviously concerned. Harry just pushes his journal across the table to Niall and leaves him to it. He can’t make himself look at Niall’s progress up to the stage. The crowd around him murmurs, calling up encouragement to Niall, who calls back cheerily, “Thanks, it’s a pleasure to be here!”

Niall clears his throat behind the mic. And then, in his raspy amplifier voice, he starts reading. He must’ve just flipped Harry’s book open to the middle because he’s reading the one about the anti-gravity machine on Coney Island.

'Course, it’s not a real anti-grav machine; the ride just spins really fast so that centrifugal force keeps you stuck to the wall. But it got Harry thinking about what if gravity could be turned off? And how it’d made sense, somehow, that something so marvelous was just for kids, because adults wouldn’t make carnival rides out of it.

Harry’s still not sure why he wrote it, or why he wrote it from his mother’s perspective. All of that falls away, though. With Niall reading it, it doesn’t sound like a bunch of words Harry scribbled down while he wasn’t paying attention to his political science lecture, bored to tears. He doesn’t dare open his eyes, but Harry listens breathlessly to Niall’s slow, careful reading.

The crowd applauds enthusiastically like they’ve been doing all night for everyone, but it feels – it feels quite good, anyway. Harry finally lifts his head to watch Niall pick his way back to their table and watches someone shake his hand and clap him on the back. Someone else in the audience wolf-whistles for him and Niall just smiles. The smile dims when he stands next to Harry. His brow wrinkles.

“I’m ready to go,” Harry says. He picks his bag up from the floor, slings the strap over his head, and shoves his hands into his pockets.

“So,” Niall says. He keeps pace at Harry’s side even tough Harry walked right past the bus stop. It’s only a few miles home, and he has time to walk. He can’t imagine not moving right now, anyway. “How mad are you, on a scale of one to ten?”

“I’m not mad. I don’t think?” Harry wonders. “No, I’m not mad. I’m just.” He takes his hands out of his pockets and starts twisting them like he’s trying to wring the life out of them. “But I don’t want to do that again. Just – no, okay?”

Niall doesn’t say anything. He keeps his eyes trained on his tattered Supras, and the dark gray sidewalk. They pass beneath an elm tree and its shadow crosses Niall’s face, rendering him totally unknown. “Could I keep that poem, though? For the band.”

Niall’s band is a couple of guys from his music courses back when he had a Music Ed. minor. Harry’s gone over to see them practice in Niall’s garage, and they were pretty terrible. Nice guys, though. Sometimes they can swing a gig at a bar near campus, Calum says; Harry hasn’t been to one of their shows.

“Sure,” Harry says. Whatever. He just wants to put this night behind him. “Are you mad at me?”

“A little,” Niall sighs. He flashes Harry a crooked smile. “I just, like. I want you to be as proud of yourself as I am.”

Harry’s traitorous heart turns inside out and double-flips backward in his chest. He thinks of Alice’s words, the betrayal on her face when she caught him having a go with one of their Battle of the Bands competitor’s moms. It hadn’t mattered how much he heard he was great, he had to hear it more. He doesn’t want to be that person again.

And that’s why he has this plan. Get into a Brooklyn Academy, work hard, get a scholarship, go to college and then law school. Make his mom proud of him, so she’d never wear that disappointed look again.

“Maybe we should take some time,” Harry finds himself saying. “You know, just. Because I have classes I need to study for, and reading, and I’ve been wasting a lot of time –”

“With me?” Niall cuts him off curtly. “That’s what we’ve been doing, wasting time?”

Harry bites his lip instead of answering, which is answer enough. Niall shakes his head, his mouth downturned like it gets when he’s tired or come home to find someone ate all his chips.

“You want to know why I really talked to you that day in the library?” Niall asks.

Harry shakes his head. “No.”

“It was ‘cos you looked lonely,” Niall says, his voice tight. “And I thought you could use a friend.”

It’s not an insult. It’s not even a mean thing to say. It still feels cruel, and hurtful, because it’s true. Niall stops and turns around, doubling back to the bus stop, Harry’s journal still clamped beneath his arm.

Harry lets them both go, and he walks home alone, and what’s worse, lonely.

 

***

 

Harry stops going to Mugar to study and stays away from Ivy Street and assumes that’ll be the undramatic end of it until he finds Zayn and Louis sat on the steps outside the English building after a week has gone by without hearing from Niall. They’re sharing a cigarette, which if Harry stops and thinks about it, is probably a little weird. On the two of them, though, more like one person than two, it seems just right.

“Hey,” he says, because he reckons better to get it over with than linger. Plus, he’s surrounded by the flood of his classmates leaving the English building behind him. The sun sets earlier and earlier as winter encroaches on campus, laying a fine blue film across his vision so that even the fiery autumn leaves seem braced for cold.

“There he is,” says Louis. “Grab him.”

Zayn just blinks slowly at Louis. He twists around to look up at Harry, and then he pats the cold white cement step next to him. Harry sits down heavily, his eyes aching from days without rest. He still sleeps, but it’s not the same.

Harry misses his favorite study carrel and Niall texting him just before bed, asking about his family and his hobbies and his favorite Boyz II Men song, and napping with Zayn on the boys’ couch when he stops by between classes. Even Liam’s nagging left an empty spot in his heart. He misses a lot of things, as it happens. It’s funny how someone can permeate your whole life without you even noticing. 

Louis doesn’t look at him, but he can hear the wheels in his head turning, studying him. Making sense of him. “What happened?” he finally asks, flat out.

Harry plays with his shoelaces. The aglet on one shoe is slowly tearing in half, leaving his shoelace frayed and dirty. “Nothing,” Harry says, because it’s true. That’s the weirdest part, maybe. They knew each other for a little more than a month and kissed once, but Harry stopped it before it ever really got a chance to start.

He was looking at himself in the mirror above his sink this morning and wondered what he’d say to himself from just a few weeks ago. _When the cute library worker asks you to come to his birthday party…_ Oh, Harry doesn’t know. He’s not any wiser than he ever was, he’s just more hurt. The two things, he’s come to find, are not the same. Harry picks a tiny branch up off the cement step next to him and starts denuding it of its leaves.

“I don’t want to be that person,” he finally mumbles.

“Gay, or bi, or whatever?” Louis asks. Both his eyebrows have gone up. “Because if that’s what your problem is, welcome to 2012, idiot! That’s okay.”

“Not that! No, I mean. You do some fucked up stuff when you’re young, you know? And I couldn’t, like. Because how could he be okay with that, you know?” He heaves a gusty sigh to cover up the way his throat is burning.

Zayn finally speaks up. He’s been sat next to Harry all this time, but he lets Louis do the talking. Now he weighs in. “I don’t think,” he starts, “that you know Niall very well at all.”

They sit in silence until the sun dips all the way beneath Bay State road.

“Want to come over?” Harry finally asks.

They splurge on McDonald’s on the way back to Harry’s, Zayn wolfing fries down straight out of the bag while Harry works on fitting his key in the lock. They lounge across his couch just like Harry imagined they might, and he dumps his bag and coat on his bed. He has the first four seasons of The Office illegally downloaded on his laptop, so they attach the HDMI cable to the boxy TV he got at a Goodwill for thirty bucks. The image isn’t great and the sound isn’t crystalline, but it’s nice and warm, all the same. Zayn nods off on Harry’s shoulder going into season two.

“What really went wrong?” Louis asks quietly. On screen, Pam and Jim share an illicit giggle. Michael looks totally confused.

Harry stops scratching his fingers gently through Zayn’s hair. “I didn’t care,” he murmurs. “I mean, about any of it. The way he looked at me, I just wanted him to do it forever.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” Louis asks delicately. The TV show plays: Roy walks into the office to find Jim curved over Pam, her hands clutched in his. They spring apart.

“Follow your heart,” Harry explains slowly, figuring it out as he says it, “doesn’t work if yours is a broken compass.”

Louis nods solemnly. Then he punches Harry in the leg. “Don’t say shit like that, man.”

Harry bites back a laugh, rubbing his aching knee. Okay then.

He doesn’t mean to start sneaking around with Niall’s friends, but Liam invites him rollerskating at his favorite rink and Harry can’t possibly miss out on that, especially not with Zayn clutching the carpeted wall for deal life while a strobe light paints the floor rainbow colors. Zayn glares daggers at anyone who dares approach.

And then Louis gets them into a Red Sox game for free; all they have to do is sell pretzels for two hours, and then they find empty seats in the nosebleeds and drink the rum Louis snuck in under his baseball cap.

Winter pushes autumn out the door and closes it behind. Harry invests in an electric blanket that it gets harder and harder to climb out of every morning to go to class, and he has to phone his mom for money to replace his tatty Converse with a pair of weather-proof Doc Martens. Liam comes to fetch him around six or seven am, and they jog on Comm Ave’s side streets, exploring Boston as only college students can. Harry’s favorite thing is when they stop for breakfast burritos from the bodega on the corner on their way home.

Harry’s study group expands till it seems like every member of the class is part of it. Harry has to tell Jade that he can’t make their library reservations anymore, he’s too cowardly to face Niall, so she takes over.

Every Wednesday without fail, Harry sneaks in through the library’s entrance, terribly afraid and desperately hoping that Niall will be there. He daydreams about touching the pale patches of skin Niall’s tanktop never covered: the top of his bony ribcage, the smooth muscle leading up to his shoulder, the hollows under his arms. He writes a lot of stupid love poems without writing them down.

Liam brings it up first, three days before Harry’s train ticket takes him home for the first time since term started for Thanksgiving. “Niall’s band got a show,” he starts slowly. “He’s opening for this new band, Field Report, at the Orpheum. Well, technically, he’s opening for the opener, but,” Liam worries over his bottom lip.

“No,” Harry says, and leaves it at that.

Zayn tries another tack. “Man, I’m not gonna like the music. You gotta go so at least one of us can be like, ‘Hey, great job, dude!’”

“Lie,” says Harry, leveling his best death glare at Zayn over the top of his biology textbook.

Louis tracks Harry down in the lobby of the English building. There’s a few overstuffed armchairs and glass-top tables with precious books inside, and Harry’s taking a little granola bar break between classes. Louis jumps him and forces his way into Harry’s lap, all but shoving his hand in Harry’s mouth when Harry opens it to complain. “You don’t have to talk to him,” Louis says. It’s this, strangely, that has Harry thinking he _would_ like to talk to Niall. Just to explain. To explain.

“You don’t even have to let him see you. Just go for us, eh?” Louis asks. So Harry agrees.

He doesn’t call Gemma to ask what to wear because Liam, Louis, and Zayn drop by his apartment to carpool to the Orpheum together. Liam picks out Harry’s skinniest pair of skinny jeans and the faded Stones shirt he could never make himself throw away, and by the time Harry’s done wondering if he looks stupid in the bathroom by himself the taxi is waiting.

Zayn’s bony fucking knee digs into Harry’s leg and Liam keeps accidentally elbowing him in the face in the squashed backseat, but even those nice, safe tethers to the outside world don’t settle the storm raging in Harry’s stomach. He’s missed him. It bounces along to every pulse of his heart like a drumbeat: _I miss you, I miss you, I miss you._

Which is a silly thing to think, the logical part of his brain reminds himself. But maybe it’s not always about how long you know someone, or how well. Maybe sometimes it’s about all the things you could learn about them and the things you could one day do together. The way you can tell that you’re going to love a book the moment you pull it off the shelf at a bookstore and hold it in your hand for the first time, and it fits.

Together, the four of them scraped up enough money for four tickets to the pit, which Harry and Liam are pretty psyched about, while Louis and Zayn are already wobbling a little on the amount of cherry vodka they chugged from the liter bottle in the piss-smelling alleyway outside the theatre.

Liam leads the way through the crowd already gathered in front of the stage. The seats behind them fill slowly, less pressure to arrive early if you don’t have to queue up for a good spot. Harry bounces on the balls of his feet, nervously touches his hair, and thinks about all the things he’d like to say to Niall if he got the chance. Which he won’t, and his life is not a damn Cameron Crowe movie. But would that it were.

Jesus. At least he can go home to microwaved popcorn and cry over Almost Famous on Netflix after this.

It feels like a very long wait and a very short one at the same time until the lights go dark. The crowd’s cheers rise up, bright and sharp and high-pitched, and then a spotlight illuminates stage right. Niall strides out, confident as ever, his newly blond hair brassy and bright under stage lights. He loops an acoustic guitar strap over his head as he goes, and then he drags a wooden stool from the background to the microphone set up center stage.

“Heya,” he says, and the crowd titters. Liam puts his hand on Harry’s shoulder, and he realizes he’d been jumping up and down. Wanting to bounce right onto the stage next to Niall, so he could be there with a smile and a nod when Niall glances away from the crowd, his Adam’s apple bobbing when he swallows.

“Where’s the rest of the band?” Louis asks, miraculously clear-minded.

Zayn shrugs. “Niall’s better off without them,” he murmurs softly, and none of them disagree. Harry can’t argue, either.

Besides, he gets Niall’s soft, lilting voice all on its in exchange. It doesn’t feel like any kind of loss.

Niall’s voice, accompanied only by his careful finger-picking, reminds Harry of the scene in Hocus Pocus where the witch sings and casts a spell over the audience; this feels a little like a spell, too. Like Niall’s soft, raspy voice is their very own Pied Piper. He starts off with a cover of “Ho Hey,” making it new again his own way. Then he transitions into original material.

Harry’s original material. His poems. His songs. _Their_ songs.

“Oh, my God,” Harry says, unsure if he even said it out loud or if he just thought it.

Louis leans in and shouts into Harry’s ear, “You like it?”

Harry just wraps his arms around Louis’s neck and buries his face in his shoulder. Once the audience starts clapping along with the song, though, he has to let go and start clapping, too. He’s been on stage himself before so he knows there’s no way Niall can see him, but for a split second, it’s like he knows he’s there.

Once Niall’s set is over, Harry tries to tell the others, “I’m going to –”

“Go get ‘im,” Louis just rolls his eyes, so Harry shoulders his way through the crowd. He’s not sure how to find the backstage area, but he reckons if he walks around the venue it’ll turn up.

He finds Niall in the lobby wiping his sweaty face off on the sleeve of his flannel shirt.

“You went blond,” are the first words out of Harry’s mouth, although he intends to say so much more. So much _better._ He’s never been very good at talking, though.

Niall pulls his face away from his arm. “I did, yeah,” he says. “How’s it look?”

“Terrible,” Harry admits, daring to step closer to him. “Why didn’t you let Zayn help you?”

Niall laughs and bows his head a little so that Harry can see it better. Harry runs his fingers through his hair, and it’s a little fried, but it’s still soft. Harry can’t smell Niall over the spilled beer on the floor and roughly a thousand sweating bodies inside the venue, but he can remember his scent, now. He wants to shove his face into the middle of Niall’s chest and lick his arms and suck bruises onto the backs of his knees, among other things. He wants to apologize, most of all.

“I got spooked,” Harry admits.

“I spooked you?” Niall asks. Inside the theatre, the next act must’ve come up on stage, because everybody starts screaming again. That, or something caught fire.

“And it’s been miserable,” Harry says pitifully. “Nobody else likes my puns and Louis doesn’t let me win at Halo and I miss you.”

Niall’s already started smiling. “I scared you? You’re scared of me?” he repeats delightedly. Then his expression sobers, and he looks round. He grabs Harry’s wrist and pulls him toward the bathroom, Harry only realizing when he gets a weird look how this will appear. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Niall says, leaning back against a porcelain sink. He folds then unfolds his arms across his chest.

Instead of saying anything, Harry drops to his knees. He reaches out carefully to put his hands on Niall’s legs and thinks better of it, starting at his ankles instead.

“Harry,” Niall murmurs. “You don’t have to.”

He _wants_ to, is the thing. He doesn’t know how to put it all into words, the _I’m sorry_ and _It wasn’t you_ and _Do you feel it too?_ All he can do is grasp Niall’s skinny ankles and slide his hands up his legs, feeling out the muscle and bone as he goes. His calves are so skinny Harry can almost circle his fingers around them. Harry palms Niall’s knees, Niall’s eyes fluttering shut for a second when Harry digs his fingers into the cartilage not going missed.

Niall combs his fingers through Harry’s hair while Harry continues his slow exploration of Niall’s skinny legs. Someday he’d like to get his pants off while he did this so he could leave those bruises on the backs of Niall’s knees like he wants to. His own dick aches, and he has to pause and close his eyes for a moment so that he’ll remember what he’s here to do.

“Shouldn’t linger,” Niall murmurs. “Someone’s going to walk in on us soon.”

Harry groans. Jesus, that would be hot, Niall’s jeans down and Harry’s mouth on him, both of them unable to move even though moving would be the easiest thing in the world. Maybe even Niall thrusting into his mouth, his hair tight in Harry’s hair, not so gentle and soft, using him.

“Harry,” Niall says, caught somewhere between a laugh and a groan of his own. Harry slides his hands up over Niall’s little pert butt, and he thinks about turning him around and – okay, yeah, another time. Jesus. Harry presses the heel of his hand against himself and undoes the button on Niall’s jeans, then the zipper. He doesn’t wear his jeans as tight as Harry does, so it’s easy to get them down.

Harry tucks his fingers into the waistband of Niall’s boxers and leans in, determined to smell him; the fabric’s already damp, and he smells like _boy_ , musky and hot. Niall’s hips twitch into Harry’s face. “Harry,” Niall repeats. If he’s lucky, there will be nights that he gets to take his time, tease Niall until he’s begging for it. That’s not what’s meant to be doing right now, not when he’d like so much to make something up to Niall.

“Please don’t get tired of me,” Harry says around the sudden lump in his throat. Niall puts his hand on the top of Harry’s head, and Harry can smell the party that first night they hung out, sweet barbecue smoke and the last breath of summer before fall set in, and it feels like a wish.

Niall hums, and it sounds happy. “Like you too much,” Niall murmurs.

Harry pulls Niall’s boxers down his skinny legs and works his hand into an easy glide along Niall’s dick. His mouth is watering so much he feels a little pervy about it, like he’s some kind of dick-sucking bathroom goblin. Then Niall touches the corner of his mouth, Harry’s lip stinging a little from how hard he’s been biting it, and all the weirdness vanishes. He takes Niall in slow, like how he remembers from the high school graduation party he went to where he hooked up with his former classmate. This is so different, though. He’s not drunk, and he’s not just exploring, he wants to make it _good._

Harry pulls away to lick his lips and swallow and consider his next move. The taste is bitter and musky but not entirely unpleasant.

“Jesus,” Niall murmurs, looking down at him.

Harry licks his lips again, this time out of nerves. “Could you turn around, just for a second? Please?”

The concert’s still going on outside, and it’s a small miracle they haven’t already been walked in on. Somehow Harry can’t bring himself to care. He just puts his mouth to the back of Niall’s knee and starts sucking, letting his front teeth dig in a little so that Niall moans low in his throat.

“That,” Niall starts, then stops. He’s put his hand on himself loosely, and Harry pulls it away and replaces it with his own. Suddenly the music stops playing outside and Harry pauses, confused, before Niall grunts, “Opener’s done.”

Somehow the fact that he’s still thinking and talking infuriates Harry, who puts his lips carefully around Niall’s dick and takes him slowly into his mouth, till the corners of his lips are burning and his throat keeps trying to swallow around him. He experimentally pushes his tongue up against Niall’s dick and suddenly Niall’s hand fists in his hair. Harry’s in the middle of a mental conga dance when the come hits the back of his throat and he has to pull away or choke.

That, of course, is when the door bangs open and a couple of college-age dudes walk in. They don’t even stop, just pass Niall and Harry and go straight for the urinals.

Niall wipes Harry’s face clean with his thumb, smiling down at him softly, like he knows. It’s scary to have someone who sees right past all your bullshit. But sometimes it’s so, so nice when they do.

Harry takes Niall’s hand and lets the other boy pull him up, and then he tries to subtly press the front of his jeans against the porcelain sink as he washes his hands, just for some relief. A tiny little bit of relief. He follows Niall out of the Orpheum, trying to look as cool and unaffected as Niall does. The second they step outside onto the cold street, though, Niall takes his hand.

“I’ve got Louis’s keys,” he tells Harry quietly.

“What kind of a boy do you think I am?” he jokes, and then sucks in a breath through his teeth. Maybe he doesn’t really want to know.

He really wants to know.

“Mostly good,” Niall answers. “Gives a great blowie, too.”

Harry laughs. Despite what he said, the moment Niall slides into the truck and shuts his door, Harry’s climbing across the bench seat and into Niall’s lap.

“It’s not going to be very good like this,” Niall complains, even as his hand goes for Harry’s zipper.

Harry stops trying to inhale Niall from the top down. “I’m eighteen,” he points out, more than halfway to laughing.

Niall nods. “Good point.”

His mouth is right there, so close, but Harry keeps going round and round, like a ship tacking into the wind. He kisses the hinge of Niall’s jaw, and the freckles dotted up his neck and the side of his face, and his eyebrows. He places a tender, loving kiss on both of his eyelids, and his cheeks, and his chin. Niall keeps his strokes slow and just this side of too dry, like they’re children on a playground playing a game of chicken, trying to see who will break first.

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird?” Niall asks, pulling his hand away to lick his palm and fingers for a slick glide. Harry stares. “That you’ve had my dick in your mouth but we haven’t even proper kissed yet?”

“Also had your hand, and your elbow, and your knee in my mouth on various occasions,” Harry ticks off on his fingers. He says it as lightly as he can manage, but his voice is rough and cracked from sucking Niall off in the bathroom, and it shows. “Just another bit, really.”

Niall just hums, and Harry realizes it’s one of their songs. Harry finally kisses him on the mouth, humming soft in his chest, and Niall presses his hand flat over Harry’s heart. “I think,” he tells Harry, when Harry’s moved back from the slick slide of Niall’s mouth against his just to catch his breath, Niall’s hand just tight enough around him. He’s holding out as long as he can, wants Niall to be impressed with him, to have fun with him, to love him. “I think it popped,” Niall repeats, plastering a concerned look over his face.

Harry pauses as if to feel his own heart beat. “Ah, you’re right,” he says, dropping his head onto Niall’s shoulder.

“Like a piñata,” Niall says, and for some reason, the idea that Niall sees him as a papier-mâché thing stuffed with candy has him coming all over Niall’s hand.

Harry melts into Niall’s lap, mindless of the mess. He loops his arm up around Niall’s neck just in case Niall thinks about pushing him off, and then he sighs, soothed against his skin.

“We’re friends again, yeah?” Niall murmurs, as if he has to check to be sure.

It’s actually kind of nice, knowing that Harry has words for what they are. Friends, yes. He nods.

“Want to come back to mine and play Sims? I’ll design the houses if you do the people,” Niall offers.

It’s such a nerdy, uncool offer to make. Harry says yes.

 

***

 

Harry texts Niall at the train station while he waits for his ride home. _Bring me back food_ Niall has sent, probably not even fully awake yet.

 _Keep Boston warm for me,_ he answers.

Niall sends a line of emojis: a couple of the building ones, a tree, something that looks like a shoe. Harry doesn’t even know what it means, but he shakes his head, clutching his phone to his chest.

Harry finds it’s strange to be home, where nothing has changed but something feels like it has. Like the way the whole world would look different when he was sixteen and seventeen and going through that last growth spurt, and he would get out of bed some days an inch taller than when he went to sleep. His whole perspective changed.

Now his home feels smaller than it used to, and less…less close, maybe, to the things he likes. The bodega where he always bought milk and eggs on his way home from school is still just where it used to be, but they don’t sell a good Boston-style corndog hot from the spit, perfect after a cold day of class. And the boys are so far away now, spread all over the country to visit their families. Harry has to put thoughts of them aside in order to enjoy his time at his mom’s house.

“You seem happy,” Gemma observes, leaning in the doorway to his room. Harry’s been sat on his bed for who knows how long, just staring out the window down onto the narrow street. It’s a blustery day, sleet raining down on the heads of the woman and her young daughter hurrying home, and Harry rubs his arms without thinking about it. “Are you happy?”

Harry shrugs, and then he moves over to make room for her to sit beside him. He’s always told her everything if she asked. That was the deal he cut with himself when he had essentially ruined all of his relationships in one fell swoop with some kid’s mom whose name he doesn’t even remember now: he’s not allowed to lie.

Gemma presses her lips together and casts her eyes up to the ceiling, where the last of his stick-on glow stars cling desperately. “If you’re sad about going back,” she murmurs, “it’s only for a couple of weeks to do finals, and then you can come home again.”

“I’m not homesick,” Harry says. Then, amending himself, “I’m not homesick for…”

Gemma nods knowingly. “That fast, huh?” she asks.

Harry thinks of the cluttered frat house where his best friends live, and the study group that slowly grew to include most of his whole section, and the coffee booth on the sidewalk between the economics and science building who starts preparing his latte the moment he turns the corner and steps into sight. He thinks of his tiny apartment, less empty now that he has friends who drop by to hang out without wondering if they’re invited. Of course they are.

“That’s all?” Gemma presses. She puts her hand over his knee, and even their hands look alike. Pale and long-fingered, slender artist’s hands. She makes good work of hers holding a pen over the page or tapping away at a keyboard while she writes her dissertation.

Harry starts picking at the hole in the knee of his jeans. “What,” he struggles, “why d’you do it? Getting your doctorate, I mean. Do you want – What do you want?”

Gemma doesn’t even pause to think. “To teach, obviously. You know kids.” She runs her hand through his hair, and Harry leans into her side, closing his eyes. He shouldn’t act so much like a little boy when he spent most of last night cuddled up to Niall in his bed, competing to see who could get the other off more times. But growing up doesn’t seem to work like that. It’s not a switch that gets flicked, it’s like seeing where you want to go and building a bridge to that place. Sometimes the place you end up is not what you expected at all and sometimes it’s like coming home.

Harry hums, not fully understanding.

“You just keep hoping,” Gemma murmurs. “That you’ll have made some kind of difference, you know? And even if you never know. I don’t know, sometimes the hope is all it takes, right?” She laughs, a little self-consciously. He’s never heard her sound so young.

“Is that it?” Gemma ventures, when they’ve been sat on his little bed with their arms around each other for long enough that Harry’s back is starting to cramp.

And yeah, it’s close enough. There’s still the whole thing about Harry slowly becoming quite sure that he doesn’t want to be a lawyer and Niall _Niall Niall Niall,_ the thought his mind keeps dancing back to when he lets his attention wander for any length of time. The dimple on his left cheek that only shows up when he’s smiling really hard and the way he closes his eyes when he laughs and how it’s so easy for Harry to make him laugh.

Gemma ruffles his hair and stands up, stretching her back. She pokes him in the forehead and wanders out of his room, humming under her breath, and Harry only waits about five seconds before he reaches into his bedside table and fumbles through the two condoms, a flashlight, pocketfuls of change he dumped in there, and handful of pens for one of his old writing journals.

It’s different now, it seems. That is, Harry pops the cap off one of his pens, he’s not just writing this stuff down now for himself, because he wants everyone to love him. It’s because someone could or might or does and he wants to put down in words that he’s loved back.

“I’m going to kill one of ‘em,” Niall says darkly the next day. They only get the long weekend off for Thanksgiving, and Harry’s already counting the hours till the train takes him back to Boston on Sunday.

“They’re your cousins, Niall,” Harry says. He digs around in the kitchen cabinets for the pie pan, the metal pots and pans ringing against each other unpleasantly. He sets the dented pie pan on the counter and goes to the fridge next.

He can just imagine Niall shaking his head. “They’re lunatics, and I don’t know any of ‘em,” Niall says. Then, more thoughtfully, “Half of them aren’t really my cousins anyway, more like people who invited themselves over for Sunday roast one day and never left.”

“You’ve got that accent going on,” Harry observes, listening to Niall round out the hard edges of vowels with his very strongest Southie accent.

Niall laughs. “Alright, well. Speaking of, um, Sunday roast. You can come, if you want? I mean, I want you to come. The other boys will be there too, so it won’t be. Anyway, half my cousins are insane but you can meet some of them if you want.”

Harry pauses with his head in the fridge, cold air blowing through his curls, making his eyes sting. “I’d love to,” he murmurs, and it’s like Niall brightens audibly. The whole room grows brighter and warmer, closer and more familiar.

“Can’t wait,” Niall rings off.

When Harry turns from the fridge, his mom is leaning against the counter with her arms folded across her chest. “Who was that?” she smiles.

“Nobody you know,” Harry says, in as snarky a voice as he dares take with his mom. Both of them laugh.

“You look peaked,” Anne observes. She touches the side of Harry’s face, her palm brushing the all of two beard hairs he’s managed to grow. Niall has actual _chest_ hair and Harry is as smooth as a baby, which is completely unfair, even if he is a little younger. “Too thin, and tired. Are you sure you’re happy there, you’re not lonely?”

Harry just nods.

Anne believes him, because Harry earned that back. He swallows, his stomach suddenly heavy with guilt. He’s not lying to her, like he promised, but he’s not telling her everything, either. He wants to. But what if she knew – because she’s always known him, and she’d just know, somehow – and saw the truth in his confusing little heart. Harry’s not sure what that truth is but it’s probably not good, so he changes topics, and she’s happy to catch him up on what the neighbors have been doing since he left. 

Niall and the rest of the boys are there to pick him up for Sunday roast in Louis’s rusted blue Ford when Harry steps off the train on Sunday, and it’s like coming home.

 

***

 

Even though Harry’s apartment is way smaller than the frat house, all four of the lads move into his place come finals. Zayn shows up first on the last day of classes, looking frazzled and asking to stay for supper (and then never leaves). Louis comes looking for somewhere quiet to study without the distraction of Liam to keep him from getting to his last semester and tells Liam where his boyfriend went into hiding to finish his art project, so Liam shows up with extra blankets and pillows. Niall gets an invitation.

“Look at the little loves,” Louis murmurs to Harry while Harry makes them all a pot of green tea to keep their immune systems boosted in this time of duress. He’s not sure why Louis is awake when he should’ve been up till the wee hours studying with the rest of them. He just shrugs when Harry asks. “Like my own sisters, they are.”

“You’ve a bunch of them, right?” Harry asks, blowing across the top of his tea to cool it. His transparent IKEA mug looked really cool at the store but he didn’t realize that it’d be hot as hell to hold.

Louis hums. He’s uncharacteristically quiet, so Harry starts talking to fill the silence. “I’ve only the one sister, and she’s older than me. I wish I’d had younger ones, or little cousins to play with. I love kids.”

“Me, too,” Louis says. He folds his arms across his chest in a way that’s only ever been defensive, and Harry wonders what he’s said wrong. He’s a little out of touch with Louis, maybe. Ever since he started sleeping with Niall he’s felt distant from Louis, but he figured it only had to do with not hanging out as much. They used to hang out at the batting cages together because it was cheap and beer was $2 a cup, and nobody bothered to ID Harry. He wonders, now, if he’s been missing something. “Have you…did you ever think about having kids?” Louis asks.

Harry blinks, and then he balks. “I mean, we’ve only been together for like…a few weeks, I dunno,” he starts tentatively.

Louis laughs. “Jesus. Look at your little face, I wasn’t asking like that.”

Harry laughs out of relief, too, and Louis follows him back through the bedroom where Niall is starfished across the bed, snoring fit to wake the trees, to his tiny balcony. It’s just barely wide enough to allow both of them room to stand, but the wind is coming on from the other side of the building, so it’s not as drafty as stepping out the front. And this way they won’t wake the boys.

“What’s going on?” Harry asks, watching Louis worry over his bottom lip and clench and unclench his hands around the railing like he wants to strangle it.

Louis’s voice breaks on a laugh. “I fucked up, man.”

Harry puts his hand on Louis’s shoulder. He’s wearing one of his frat’s crush shirts, so he must be cold. His shoulder is rigid under Harry’s touch. “It’s okay,” Harry mumbles helplessly.

Louis takes a couple of deep breaths. “Just. Harry,” Louis starts, turning to him. He has the same look on his face as the time he hit a raccoon in his truck on their way back from the movie theatre, that look of total loss. Harry’s forehead wrinkles sympathetically. God, he wishes Niall was awake right now. Or Liam, or Zayn. Someone who could help him out here. “I’m not coming back after Christmas.”

Harry blinks. “What?” he asks. “What, like…not back here?”

“Not to school,” Louis swallows. “I got someone pregnant, Harry, I…I can’t give it six months till I graduate, there are doctor’s bills and baby clothes and bottles and diapers, and I –”

“No, no,” Harry says. He shakes his head. “It’s just a few more months, you don’t have to drop out. We can all work, we’ll all help out –”

Louis actually laughs at him, which hurts worse than Harry expects. “No, man. I mean, thanks, but. I’ve got to be serious about this.”

“Serious doesn’t mean hopeless, Christ, Lou,” Harry says. He rubs the back of his neck. “Well, you’ve at least got to take these finals. So you can come back someday and finish your degree.”

Louis looks at him, and he’s wearing an expression Harry’s never had to see in real life before now. He looks helpless. It’s much different than the poems describe; it looks more like the face of someone who’s already dead than someone staring death in the eye.

“C’mon,” Harry says firmly. “You know I’m right.”

Louis shakes his head, but there’s something soft about it. Hopeful. When he and Louis go back inside, they find Zayn still snoozing on the couch, Liam peering out of the window with nothing but his boxers on. “It’s snowing,” he says, looking thrilled.

“Yikes,” mumbles Harry. He wonders how many times he can trip in one winter.

“Get your boyfriend up,” Louis says to Harry. He’s fully back in fraternity officer mode now, his voice all enthusiasm and charisma: _I_ want this, why don’t you? “We’re going sledding.”

So Harry pads back into his bedroom and pinches Niall’s nostrils shut until he wakes up with a stuttered little gasp, his cheeks flushed cherry red. “What the hell,” Niall pants. He sounds sleepy and soft and his hair is ruffled on the pillowcase. He sits and sleeps with his legs spread like some sort of invitation, and if his annoying roommates weren’t just in the other room, Harry would gladly take him up on the offer.

“We’re going sledding,” Harry says. “I think your frat bros are trying to kill me.”

Niall struggles up till he’s sitting. In the living room, Harry can hear the other guys pulling their clothes on, excitedly making plans to trek to the dining hall to snag a couple of trays for them to sled on. Niall stretches on the bed like a cat. He folds his arms beneath his head and smiles up at Harry like something out of a fairy tale. “Fantastic,” says Niall.

They stop for eggs and bacon and sausage and bowls of cereal at the dining hall before they sneak out with a couple of the battered plastic trays shoved under the backs of Louis’s and Zayn’s coats, twin smiles on their faces. They catch the bus to Outlook Park, which is crested in glistening white snow, perfect and untouched. Everybody else must be inside studying. They should be, too, but. “Race you to the top,” Harry says as he breaks for the lead.

“That’s cheating!” Liam calls, hot on his tail.

Harry’s panting by the time he’s climbed to the top of the hill, and sweat rolls down the back of his neck under the collar of his heavy winter coat. Louis and Zayn and Niall pick up the rear, all huffing and puffing. Smoker’s lungs.

The view from the top of the hill makes Harry wish he had a camera so he could record this moment for forever. Boston unrolls in front of him like he’s the king of the hill, and he loves it with a fierce possessiveness he didn’t know he had. Then Louis tackles him into the snow and Liam and Zayn start negotiating how to give Liam a push-start on his makeshift sled and Harry forgets all about saving the moment in favor of shoving a handful of snow down Louis’s shirt while he grinds Harry’s face into the icy ground.

Harry thinks, _I’m so happy_ , right before his and Niall’s sled ride veers unexpectedly to the side and dumps them both over into the powdery snow, and Harry’s left laughing up at the cloudless blue sky, Niall at his side.

           

***

 

Harry survives finals with two A’s, an A-, and a B+ in biology, which isn’t perfect. But it seems good enough. Especially with Niall nosing behind Harry’s ear in the library between stacks of old periodicals, his hands on Harry’s waist.

“Stay here,” Niall urges him, sounding a little like a broken record. “Work here over the break.”

Harry tips his head back onto Niall’s shoulder so that Niall’s mouth will move along the side of his neck, instead. He leaves a biting bruise on the hinge of Harry’s jaw, Harry’s stomach swooping like a feather falling down to earth. Niall pulls Harry back against him more firmly, his fingers spreading over Harry’s hip under his shirt.

Harry closes his eyes. “Need work experience,” he murmurs, trying to guide Niall’s hands to the button on his jeans. Niall’s blunt nails scrape over the thin trail of hair leading down from his belly button and Harry makes a tiny sound in the back of his throat.

“Stay in the house with me,” Niall goes on. His hand slides beneath the waistband of Harry’s jeans. “Can take our time with it.” Niall’s half-hard dick presses against Harry’s bum. “Not just that,” Niall murmurs, like Harry’s not already almost sold. “Feed the ducks in the Fens and play your new songs on the weekends…”

He sucks Harry’s bottom lip into his mouth, Harry feeling a little like he’s being slowly consumed by a skinny Irish Bostonite. Which is funny, because most of the time he’d quite like to swallow Niall whole like the Big Bad Wolf. Niall could live inside his stomach and warm him from the inside out. It only sounds creepy when he says it out loud.

The mention of Harry’s songs sends tingles up his spine. He likes to huddle on the couch in their living room with his journal. Niall is forever trying to peek over his shoulder, his mouth crammed full of mushy banana, asking loudly about “the next verse” and “the chorus for this one.” They’re not choruses, they’re a refrain. And yeah. Harry puts one in almost every poem.

It’s probably a little wrong, is all, right? Like, it’s some kind of weird performance kink where he writes son- uh, poems about Niall, and then lays in bed with his political science book and listens to him learn the new songs. Niall has been teaching him the guitar, too. So Harry can write for it.

Which is silly and whatever, it doesn’t mean anything. Except one day after Harry made them pancakes for breakfast Zayn told him that Niall tried out for American Idol when he was a young boy and didn’t make it through, so Harry looked up his audition on YouTube. Christ, he was a tiny little young thing. He had those rosy red cheeks and the worst hair Harry’s seen on him yet. Sometimes Harry can still hear the way his voice got all choked up when the judges told him no, though. When he can’t sleep, or when Niall’s walking up to the stage with the neck of his acoustic guitar clutched in his hand, and Harry worries he’s being selfish.

“Could play with me,” Niall says into Harry’s ear. The tip of his tongue traces the shell, and Harry shivers. “You can suck me off before the show so your voice gets,” he hums into Harry’s ear, putting some grit into it.

“My voice is like that all the time,” Harry points out, dropping his chin to his chest.  

Niall laughs. “God, fucking tell me about it. Drives me crazy.”  

Harry reaches back and pulls him closer with a hand on his hip. He pushes Niall’s hand all the way into his jeans with his other hand, sighing in relief when Niall circles his fingers around him. “I’ll let you fuck me after your next show if you get me off now, Niall, c’mon.”

So Niall does. Right before Harry goes away in the head a little with how good it is, there’s usually a moment of heightened clarity, where he can feel Niall’s hot damp breath on his neck and his strong, calloused fingers around him and the muscles in his chest against his back. It’s almost as good as another orgasm, the way his body feels too much, and then he comes.

Harry leans his head into a bookshelf, and Niall goes back to kissing the back of his neck like nothing ever happened. “There you go,” he says, sounding far too pleased with himself.

The decision to stay in Boston over the winter holiday was easy when Harry had Niall plastered to his back, his hard-on rutting against Harry’s ass. It’s much harder when his mom calls to make sure he’s coming back for Christmas and Harry has to explain that he’s just staying a few days, not a few weeks. She gets so worried that something must be wrong that Harry finally breaks down and tells her, “I met someone.”

Which is why he’s in Niall’s bed right now, playing connect the dots with his freckles and wondering how best to ask him to meet his parents. Their hairy legs rub together under the covers and it’s still one of Harry’s favorite sensations, the soft sheets and the downy hair on Niall’s skinny legs.

“I, uh,” he starts. “Well, so you know how – because I met your folks and your nan and we have Sunday roast with them, and – so, uh –”

“Spit it out, Haz,” Niall says, sounding not least amused. He rubs his hand down Harry’s back, the lightness of his touch enough to make Harry close his eyes for a moment.

Harry tucks his face into Niall’s armpit. It’s not exactly the best-smelling place to be unless you like the way Niall’s sweat smells, and Harry _did_ work him up like that, and he’s a dirty pervert, so what. He likes it in Niall’s armpit. He doesn’t have to talk and no one wants him to explain himself and he can smother himself to death, potentially, if this goes badly. “Mmf.”

“Try that again,” Niall says, smoothing his hand down the back of Harry’s head.

Harry lifts his head from Niall’s armpit. “Will you come home with me and meet my parents?”

Niall’s whole face smiles. The room brightens considerably. “Finally,” he says.

Harry wanders down to the kitchen to leave Niall to buy his train ticket and pack, because apparently he’s quite excited about this. Harry is, too, just. His mom is going to meet this boy he’s been sleeping with and Harry thought he wasn’t being selfish with Niall but maybe he has been. Maybe Niall loves him better than Harry loves Niall.

Louis’s in the kitchen when Harry gets there. He’s sat at a barstool looking at something on his phone, and Harry rocks on his heels in the doorway, wondering whether he can ask. The other lads found out about tiny Tommo-to-be the night after finals.

They were all very drunk and there was a lot of shouting and slamming doors, but there’s nothing like sharing bags of greasy Taco Bell to cure your hangover to get everybody calmed down again. Zayn and Liam hustle down the stairs and out the door without stopping while Harry’s collecting his mug and tea bag from the cabinet, the room suddenly turning a little colder.

Harry raises his eyebrows at Louis, who shrugs back. He traces the grout between tiles at the bar with his fingernail. “‘S my fault I didn’t tell them sooner.”

“It must be weird,” Harry observes, leaning against the counter while his mug full of water heats up in the microwave. “For them to be together, but for you to be both of their best friend.”

“Not anymore, it seems,” Louis murmurs, positively scratching his thumb against the counter now. Harry moves over and puts his hand over Louis’s, who looks away.

Harry met up with Briana and Louis after her very first ultrasound for coffee and ice cream. She’s a lovely girl, New Haven-local Harvard student. She’s putting her schooling aside for a while, too, to have the baby, and going back to her parents’. Louis’s moving in with them too when he gets back from Christmas with his family.

New Haven isn’t so far away. Just a couple of hours. It’s not like he’s moving to the dark side of the moon. That’s what Harry told himself when he and Niall went to the movies with Liam and Zayn and no one thought to smuggle in their stock of Red Vines and no one tried to shove anyone else’s head under a faucet in the bathroom. It reminds Harry of a poem he read, the line “Changed, changed utterly.” That’s what it feels like.

“We’ll still be here, yeah? The boys, I mean. You’ll make it right,” Harry says firmly.

Louis looks at him with very deep blue eyes. “Take care of them, yeah?”

Harry blinks, cocking his head. “I-”

A crooked grin works its way up to Louis’s face. Softly, he says, “Niall will take care of you. You take care of everybody else, yeah?”

Harry has to swallow past a sudden weight in his stomach. No, not his stomach. His heart. It feels a lot like the way he felt when his acceptance letter from Brooklyn Academy came in the mail and he knew that he was moving on from his old friends and his old school. Most of the time you don’t know those moments when they happen but he knew that one. He thinks he’ll know this one, too. “You take care of yourself, then,” he says gruffly, circling his fingers around his hot mug so that he has the pain to concentrate on instead of the way Louis’s looking at him.

“If I hadn’t had to go,” Louis says, “and you’d have rushed, I’d have sponsored you. You’d have been my little brother.”

Harry bites out a laugh so brittle it hurts. “That’s, like, incestuous.”

Louis rolls his eyes and pushes Harry away, so Harry takes his cue to go back upstairs and help Niall pack for their trip. “Later.”

Harry doesn’t move from his spot just on the edge of the kitchen, looking at Louis’s ankles hooked around the legs of his barstool, his elbows on the bar. Like it’s any other day, and he’s waiting on the rest of them so they can go catch a baseball game from their favorite spot in the Fens.

They can just about hear the announcer’s voice if the wind is blowing the right way, and the grass is so cool and soft beneath their backs. When the game was over, they might pile into Louis’s truck, Liam and Niall bouncing around in the truck bed, their laughter buoyed up by the wind. Get Slurpees from the 7/11 on the corner and catch a second-run movie from the theatre where they sell red Solo cups of wine for six bucks and there’s a museum of bad art to explore in the basement.

“Bye,” says Harry. Louis’s face breaks into a real smile, and then Harry goes back upstairs.

 

***

 

“Make your touch gentler, like you’re stroking a kitten’s head, honestly, Styles, gonna break the baby’s neck,” says Niall, so Harry laughs and adjusts his grip on the guitar strings. “Nice,” Niall murmurs, his voice soft and light as a feather.

They’ve only been back from New York to meet Harry’s family for a day, and Harry can’t stop looking at him. His soft pink mouth and the flush on his cheeks and the slow and steady pulse of his heart in his throat. Harry had never brought anybody home before, so he’s not sure what he was expecting. Probably for his mom to look into Niall’s eyes and read his heart and level Harry with one of those looks, like, _Harry,_ the way she says his name when he accidentally broke her lamp and was so afraid to own up to it.

But she hadn’t done that. She’d just made all five of them – Gem and Robin included – heaping bowls of beef stew over rice and asked him about his life, his interests, his family. It hadn’t seemed like they just met, more like they were getting to know each other again.

“I love you,” Harry tells Niall, who freezes, looking up into his face like a deer caught in the headlights. Harry’s fingers start sweating on the journal open in front of him, warping the paper. “You, uh, don’t have to say it back. I just wanted you to know. I’m, like, stupid in love with you.”

“Harry,” Niall says patiently. His voice gets all syrupy warm.

“What?” Harry asks, looking anywhere but at Niall.

“I’ve been singing the love songs you wrote about me for months, pet.” He smiles so hard that the dimple in his cheek pops out, and Harry’s weird little heart gives a lurch against his sternum like a dog pulling against its leash. Niall falls quiet again. "Sorry. Never said it before, you know?" 

"You tell everybody you love them," Harry says sourly. "You told the mailman you loved him yesterday when he dropped off Louis's Cracked magazine subscription." 

Niall laughs. "Yeah, but, like. Dunno. My family doesn't, like, when I was a kid. Just figured I always knew. Reckoned you did, too." 

Harry looks at Niall, who deserves all the love Harry has to give, and more, and who wasn't told he was loved every day of his life. Harry shuffles to the edge of his seat at the kitchen table so that his knees brush Niall’s opposite him. He clears his throat and strums another chord, smiling all over his face. He can feel it, and even if he couldn’t, he’d know by the way Niall is looking at him. "I do," Harry vows. "And I love you, too." He waits for Niall's answering smile, and then he says, “Great." He can’t stop himself laughing a little. “Let’s go again, then.”

The deal Harry struck with his mom to stay in Boston for a month with his boyfriend in their big frat house was that he had to get a job. Have some consistency in life, not stay in bed all day, blah blah blah. Harry tuned her out when he realized she just didn’t want him having sex all day, the thought of which _her_ thinking about was enough to make Harry want to go to church for five thousand years. Besides, he does need the money.

So anyway. He’d taken out his journal to jot a few things down that night, feelings he thought he might like to parse out and write out later, when he might see the edges of them. “I don’t know where to look,” Harry fretted to Niall, who was slowly but surely driving himself insane playing Flappy Bird. Too many times Harry woke up in the middle of the night to Niall’s brow furrowed in concentration, his phone screen too bright.

Niall put the game on pause. “Gig with me,” he suggested, poking his toes into Harry’s thigh.

Harry put his hand over Niall’s foot. “I just write,” he tried to say.

“I’ve heard you sing in the shower, you goddamn songbird,” Niall laughed.

“Why do you want me to?” Harry asked suspiciously.

“‘Cuz it’s not as fun to sing alone,” Niall answered, unlocking his phone screen again.

So that’s how Harry finds himself prepping for a New Year’s Eve gig at an Irish pub in Southie Boston. Niall’s “cousin” Bressie got them the gig at his pub on sheer faith, which is one of Harry’s favorite things about Niall’s extended family. They just…care about each other, selflessly, and get on with a laugh. If Harry had it to do all over again, he thinks he’d like to be Irish.

“Are you nervous?” Niall asks, standing shoulder to shoulder with him backstage at Bressie’s. Harry’s holding an acoustic guitar, Niall an acoustic bass. They sound good together. Like, _really_ good. Way better than Harry ever sounded with the garage band he played with in high school, or Niall’s former band of stoners.

“No,” Harry lies, because he always gets nervous. He remembers the bubbling storm of adrenaline and endorphins flooding through his system as well as he remembers reading Atonement for the first time.

He’s been watching Niall pluck away at the guitar strings, his voice soft and warbling, more like a bird’s than Harry’s has ever been, for months. It feels _so much better_ to be up on stage with him, their knees knocking together whey they take their seats on the battered wooden barstools Bressie brought out of his storage room for them to use. The pub, jam-packed with ebullient Irish people, quiets.

Everything catches at once, like the engine of a sports car twisting into life. Niall’s and Harry’s voices, the carefully practiced guitar chords, even the way Niall turns his face away to laugh and the microphone still picks it up. It’s like smoking pot but so much better, because there’s none of the rockiness of getting up this high this fast: it’s just pure flight, like all he was waiting for was someone to tell him _go._

They make two hundred bucks off the show. The easiest hundred bucks Harry’s ever made, he reckons. He and Niall plunge into the crowd when the show is over, drunken partygoers shouting out to buy them drinks, and they leave with business cards from a handful of other club owners to come out and audition for them.

It’s easy, falling into writing and music, the way school was never easy. It was always doable, and Harry could always make himself sit down and do it if he didn’t have somewhere else to be, someone else to be with. Maybe it’s like a person getting their first pair of prescription glasses or their first hearing aid, and the whole world snapping into focus, suddenly not lost in a haze.

“You’re buzzing,” Niall tells Harry, locking the door behind them at the boys’ house. Harry backs him up against the door, kissing him so hard his mouth hurts. Niall weaves his fingers together behind Harry’s neck, uncomplaining.

“Remember what I said? In the library that time?”

Niall’s face clouds with confusion. “I swear I was listening, uh…”

“Fuck me,” Harry says, impatient of the wait already. “You want to, right? So, let’s go. Drop trou.”

“No, wait, wait,” Niall says. “I thought you’d want, like, romance.”

“So, we’ll light a candle. Come _on,_ Niall,” he starts dragging Niall up to his bedroom. He shimmies out of his clothes as fast as he can, and then he sets about trying to help Niall out of his. He can’t seem to work the buttons on the front of Niall’s shirt, so he just lifts it up over Niall’s head from the hem. Niall’s head pops out in a ruffled blond-topped halo, and Harry takes a moment to smooth it down before he starts kissing Niall again.

It’s not that Harry ever thinks that Niall’s not beautiful, but some moments, a moment like this, he wants to remember like a photograph. Harry remembers Niall’s hair blowing in the wind from Louis’s open window, his throat bared and his head tipped back in a laugh on their way somewhere. Niall, the first time Harry ever saw him, standing over him in the library and offering him the beginning of everything.

This moment, right now, with Niall standing across from him with no trace of self-consciousness, his eyelashes tangled and the tip of his nose pink with cold. He’s not something carved out of marble like Liam’s muscles or Zayn’s face, but that makes it all the better.

Niall puts his hands on Harry’s hips and squeezes, and Harry basks in the way it feels. “You should do me,” Niall says, sounding a little nervous. “This first time, so I can, like. ‘Cuz it’ll be your first time, and I want it to be good for you.”

It’d been one thing to get himself off alone in his apartment to the thought of Niall’s fingers and mouth working him open. It’s a completely different thing for Niall to be offering himself to Harry like this, his eyes so blue in the wintry light filtering in through his blinds.

“And we should light a candle,” Niall adds, so Harry laughs and digs around Niall’s bedside drawer till he finds the lube and condom and lighter. The only candle Niall has is one of those tall Catholic ones, which feels a little sacrilegious.

He tells Niall so and turns to find him on the bed, his belt unbuckled and his fly unzipped. He’s shirtless, and his skin moves over the pale slats of his ribs when he breathes, his shoulders drawn tight. Nervous. Harry stares at him for a long moment, his mouth hanging open. 

“Dunno,” Niall says, flashing Harry a smile. “Doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything wrong to me, does it?” Harry sets the candle on top of Niall’s bureau, and Niall pushes himself up to his knees. Harry didn’t think he was nervous, but suddenly his heart’s hammering in his chest, and it’s Niall who has to pull him over onto the bed. They fall in a heap and Harry’s so, so grateful that they have the house to themselves for this. Not that they haven’t had to hear Liam and Zayn going at it, but this feels so personal and intimate. Harry doesn’t to share it with anyone.

Niall slides his palms over Harry’s stomach and up his chest. Harry tries to find a spot on Niall’s body he hasn’t already kissed; he’s gotten to the delicate round bone on his foot, and his knees, and the sharp V line of his hips. His flat stomach and the hollows above his collarbones. So he settles for revisiting his favorite spots, like the thick muscle at the juncture of his shoulder and neck, and that spot right at the top of his ribs that makes Niall groan when Harry bites a bruise in.

“Get the,” Niall murmurs, his hand flailing against Harry’s shoulder, so Harry finds the bottle of lube. Niall takes it out of his hands and slicks Harry’s fingers up himself. He has capable hands, Niall. That’s what Harry’s thinking.

It’s easy. Or, Niall makes it easy; he fits a pillow under his hips and tells Harry what to do with the same patient voice he uses to teach him guitar. His voice has gone so gritty and hoarse, though, like his words are reverberating inside Harry’s skeleton, and he keeps breaking off in the middle of “Just like that – ah – perfect,” to suck in a breath. Harry wonders how many songs he’s allowed to write about that.

Niall puts his hands on Harry’s shoulders, so Harry looks up at his face. His hairline is damp with sweat like sugar on a margarita glass and his eyes are so, so blue. The cords in his throat stand out with every breath, and Harry wants to bite them. “Ready?” Niall asks.

Harry nods, so Niall pushes himself up on his elbow and reels Harry in with a hand in his hair. They kiss long and slow and desultory, like an afternoon spent rolling around together in Niall’s bed, listening to Frank Sinatra records. Niall rolls easily onto his stomach and props himself up on hands and knees and Harry smooths his hands down Niall’s freckled back, feeling the muscles shiver under his touch. Harry circles his arm around Niall’s waist and leans over him to set his teeth into the back of Niall’s neck, molding his mouth to the bone at the top of his spine in a sloppy kiss.

Harry pulls back and fumblingly rolls the condom on; it’s been a while, is all. There’s a light sheen of sweat on Niall’s back, highlighting his musculature, underlining every breath. Harry smooths his hand down Niall’s back. He pauses to kiss the dimples at the bottom of his spine, the soft pale curve of his ass, the top of his hip.

“Weirdo,” Niall laughs. The muscles in his stomach jump against Harry’s hand.

“True,” Harry agrees, and eases himself in. Niall goes utterly quiet, so Harry fights the urge to move, to get his hips going, and focuses on imagining the freckles on Niall’s back into constellations, instead. There’s some line of poem he’d remember if he had any blood left in his brain; maybe he’ll recall it later.

Finally, Niall nods.

He’s so warm and tight, and it feels so good, like – like nothing else, really. But even with his brain blood-starved, Harry registers the noises Niall’s making. He’s always vocal in bed, a nonstop talker, but now he’s just making these wordless noises from deep down in his gut. His arms go slack and Harry has to concentrate on holding him up, marveling at that – that Niall lets him, that it must be so good for him.

Niall drops his weight onto his elbows and murmurs around the knuckle he’s jammed into his mouth, “C’mon, pet, put that bad back into it,” and somehow the idea that he’s not given Niall enough is for a second wind. He tightens his hands around Niall’s hips, sure that there’ll be impressions on his fair skin for ages after Harry’s let go. For some reason that’s what does it: the thought of Niall touching his own skin and liking the marks Harry would make permanent if he could has Harry coming hard and long into the condom. He all but collapses on top of Niall, who says, “Harry,” while the stars are still clearing out of Harry’s eyes.

“Sorry,” Harry murmurs. He tries to pull out fast but maybe he does it too fast, because Niall winces, so Harry slips his fingers in instead. Niall’s eyes go glassy again, his knees falling apart a little, when Harry finds the right spot. Harry shuffles down the lean line of his body and sucks him right down, and Harry can only imagine the expression on his face, the way he surges up off the bed a little.

“Did great,” Niall says unthinkingly. “So good. Perfect.” He doesn’t even sound like he knows what he’s saying but Harry could almost be purring with delight, he’s so pleased. He’s never made Niall go unfocused, so far off, before. Niall makes a sound in the back of his throat and then his knees tighten around Harry’s shoulders, and the familiar taste of him hits his lips.

Harry contemplates just staying where he’s at with his cheek on Niall’s thigh, and then he crawls back up the bed to tuck his face in close to Niall’s. Niall nudges him over so they avoid the wet spot. His eyes close, and Harry can see the thin veins threaded through his lilac eyelids. His mouth, bitten red and raw, is ajar. He’s never looked so vulnerable before. Harry’s heart aches with love.

Eventually, Harry prods Niall in the side and he blinks awake, confused. “Don’t go to sleep,” Harry says, exasperated. “It’s your turn to fuck me.”

Niall puts his hand on Harry’s face, so Harry licks his palm. Niall’s grimace turns into a laugh. “It’s called a refractory period, Styles. Congrats. You fucked me so good I’m totally useless.”

Harry can’t contain his delighted smile. “First thing tomorrow,” he says. “Promise.”

Niall drops his voice to a whisper. He fits himself along Harry’s back, his palm pressing warm and firm and familiar over Harry’s sternum. “Shh, not with the Virgin Mary watching,” he points to the candle. “What’s wrong with you?”

Harry laughs so hard he inhales a bit of downy comforter fluff, and Niall pats him on the back while he chokes. “Idiot,” Niall says. It sounds an awful lot like _I love you._

 

***

 

Winter break gives over to spring semester with hardly a pause. Liam and Zayn come home the weekend before school starts and the four of them spend two whole days marathoning Friends and eating all of the delicious homemade food Zayn’s mom sent home with him. Harry goes back to his own apartment the night before school starts because he doesn’t _actually_ live with the boys, even if he accidentally moved in for a month.

He goes over for naptime with Zayn at lunch his first day, anyway. He cracked and enrolled in a creative writing class because technically it _does_ fulfill an English requirement, so the semester workload settles in familiarly across Harry’s back like one of those poles with buckets of water on either end. He feels strong enough to bear it.

Harry and Niall keep gigging together in clubs around Boston on weekends, and soon Harry finds himself spending as much time off campus as he does on. During the day he goes to class and takes notes and meets with his old study group so they can commiserate about their new classes together, and at night or on the weekends, he and Niall and Liam gadabout at one of the pubs in Southie. Niall works his magical networking charm, Liam checks on practical stuff for them like “Will they be paid?” and Harry drinks with the locals. He meets a couple, Tom and Lou, with pictures of their singularly adorable daughter in one pub and agrees to babysit for them anytime they like.

“She’s so cute, Niall,” he hiccups, leaning on Niall on the way home. Their bus route has stopped running which means it must be past midnight, and he still has some two hundred pages of poli-sci reading to memorize if he wants to maintain his GPA. Harry snuffles into Niall’s shirt, smelling detergent and cigarette smoke. “So cute.”

“Shh, shh,” Niall says, patting Harry’s stomach. His arm tightens around Harry’s shoulders and he already knows how this night will play out: he’ll go home with Niall and go straight to sleep, and wake up in four hours to hurriedly complete his homework so he can roll up to class with a half-assed assignment that’ll still get him a B+. What’s that saying? He leans on broken water reeds, and one day, he’ll fall.

But that all feels so distant with Niall’s arm firm around him, his mouth pressing a kiss to Harry’s hair. The shows get them good money and they get more offers all the time. Every time the audience cheers for them after a song, Harry feels like the rest of it is worth it. Icing on the cake.

Zayn is sat on the bar when they get home, one elegant knee tucked under his ridiculously beautiful jaw. He blows smoke out of the open kitchen window and Niall clucks, moving to close it. “Letting out all the hot air,” he murmurs, like Harry’s mom.

“Where were you lot?” he asks. Zayn’s eyes are on Liam, though, so Harry doesn’t answer.

“Giving you space, like you asked,” Liam answers impatiently. “Or wasn’t that what you wanted?”

Niall meets Harry’s eye for a split second. He rifles through the refrigerator for a couple of bottles of water and brings one back to Harry, who cracks the cap and drinks gratefully.

Instead of answering, Zayn takes a deep hit off his cig and holds it inside for so long Harry worries it might’ve gotten stuck. He lets it out in a thick stream, the smell tickling the back of Harry’s throat. Niall starts chewing his cuticle.

“I woke up from a nap and everybody was gone,” Zayn finally says. “I woke up and the house was fucking empty, there could’ve been a fucking zombie apocalypse for all I knew.”

“I doubt even you could sleep through a zombie apocalypse,” Liam snaps, and Harry ducks his head so he won’t see Zayn’s expression. Liam and Zayn squabble all the time, but never like this. Not like Liam’s actually mad or Zayn’s actually accusing of him. What exactly is going on here?

“Boys,” Niall murmurs.

“No,” Zayn starts, then starts again, sounding calmer: “No, Nialler, it’s fine, don’t worry, it’s nothing. Just, thought something had fucking happened to you and I didn’t know so I got worried. It’s nothing. Glad you didn’t die.” He slides off the counter and pads up the stairs to his room, the line of his shoulders drawn tight.

“He does know that Louis didn’t actually die, right?” Harry murmurs.

Liam’s face drops. “Shit.”

Niall takes the bottle of water from Harry’s hand and knocks back a gulp himself. “They used to have all these, like, fake deep heart to hearts, or whatever. D’you know what they even talked about?”

Liam shakes his head. “I don’t know, man. I wasn’t there for that. That was their thing.”

Niall says, “Well, let me make you a sandwich,” so Harry hops off his barstool and follows Zayn upstairs.

Zayn is lying in bed again with his hands folded under his head. “If you had a bouncy ball, you could throw it at the wall,” Harry observes. “Like in the movies, when the teen lead gets upset. He throws a ball at the wall.”

“Shut up,” Zayn says without heat, so Harry bumbles his way across Zayn’s and Liam’s cluttered room and climbs into bed beside Zayn. “If Niall catches you here, you’re in trouble,” Zayn whispers.

“Niall could find us kissing and not think anything of it. What exactly do you guys do in that frat of yours?” Harry asks. He’s trying to be funny.

Zayn’s mouth turns down. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I haven’t been going to meetings. Or events. Liam’s vice president, though, so he just…you know, he signs the sheets for me.”

“You don’t like it anymore?” Harry asks.

Zayn’s voice comes back a soft whisper. “I don’t really like this place without Louis, man.” Harry waits for him to explain. Zayn scoots down the bed a little bit, closer to Harry. His bony hip presses against Harry’s. “Like, I met him at orientation, you know. He was my orientation leader and we were, like, right off the bat I thought ‘this guy can hang.’

“So we started talking and he was, like, ‘if you have this talent you should use it, man,’ and I don’t know. Sometimes you just need to hear your friend say something nice to you when you’re stoned, right?” Zayn laughs. “He’s the reason why I changed majors and now he’s not here and I graduate next year and my family keeps asking me what I’m going to do with it, who I want to be, what am I going to do, and I just.” Zayn’s voice is even quieter than a whisper. “Louis’s not here and I don’t know how to answer, man.”

Harry can hear himself breathing, and he’s just drunk enough that the faint taste of vomit is climbing up his throat from laying here like this. “What are you going to do?” he asks softly.

“I don’t think I can stay,” Zayn answers.

“Drop out?” Harry yelps, his voice cracking.

Zayn puts his hand over Harry’s. “No, man. Like, don’t tell Liam, okay? Not till I’m ready. But I applied for some study abroads. I can go this summer and stay. Maybe come back in the spring.”

In the _spring_? “In the spring?” Harry whispers.

“You’ll be fine,” Zayn assures him. He turns his head to look at Harry, who’s already studying Zayn’s extraordinarily attractive profile like it’s the last time he’ll ever see it. “Niall’s gonna take care of you.”

“Yeah, but,” Harry starts. He doesn’t know how to explain the way he feels about all of them, about the way he felt when all five of them were gathered in the living room to watch Attack on Titan. Louis passed a joint around and Liam and Niall made nachos and it was perfect. Perfect, that’s all Harry can say. “Zayn, c’mon, what about Liam?”

Zayn laughs sadly. “We were gonna graduate and what, move in together and hope we both got jobs in the same city? I’m from Maine, he’s from Montana, that’s,” Zayn shakes his head. “Gotta be realistic sometimes, man.”

Harry lays awake for a long moment, listening to the wind rustle the trees outside of the house. The gutters on this side of the house are forever leaking, so rain pings against Zayn’s window, soft and quiet. Downstairs, the fridge hums along to Niall’s and Liam’s conversation.

“What did Louis say?” Harry finally asks. “When you told him?”

“Didn’t tell him,” Zayn answers, rolling onto his side, away from Harry. Harry wants to put his hand on Zayn’s back, cuddle him till he melts against Harry’s side and fills him in. Something tells him it’s already too late for that. He just pats Zayn’s shoulder inside and slides off the bed to go back downstairs, and Zayn calls soft, “Harry.”

Harry pauses in the doorway. Zayn has halfway rolled onto his back to look at Harry, his eyes glittering in the dark.

“I know this is shit for you,” he starts. “But we’d have graduated next year anyway, you know? Like.”

“I know,” Harry whispers back. He closes Zayn’s door quietly behind him and turns to Niall’s room, instead, to collect his bookbag and his books and his laptop. He brought over his humidifier and his allergy medicine and his shampoo, too, and his favorite jeans and jacket. Harry’s in the middle of trying to shove it all back into his overnight bag – it’s been _many_ nights – when Niall finds him.

He sounds mostly confused. “Harry? Thought you were staying here tonight, love.”

“I have to do my homework,” Harry says. His voice comes out stuffy and he could squeeze his own nose off, he’s so mad at himself for it.

Niall puts his hands on Harry’s shoulders, his eyes warm and blue and tired-looking. When did Niall start looking so old? “What’s going on?”

“Why haven’t you looked into study abroad?” Harry asks. “You’re a Spanish major, you should be trying to get a job. Right? It’s the spring before you graduate, you should be doing that. And studying, and you could go to grad school if you wanted, have you even thought about taking the GRE?”

“No,” Niall answers simply.

“What do you think is gonna happen?” Harry all but wails. “We’re gonna keep slumming around Southie playing gigs that barely cover our tab forever?”

Niall’s face has already shut off. “Slumming?” Niall asks. “Those are my friends, Harry.”

“No, I – you know I didn’t mean it like that.” Harry stops crushing his Stones t-shirt into a tiny fabric ball. “You know I love them. I love you.”

“Then what’s wrong?” Niall asks. He takes his hands away, but not like he’s mad.

“How come you started dating a freshman?” Harry asks. “I mean, like. Why me?”

Niall mouth opens and closes a couple of times while he looks for an answer, and it’s silly, Harry shouldn’t have asked, it’s not really the question he wants answered. He zips his bag closed and puts his hands on Niall’s face, kisses him sweetly and gently.

“I love you,” Harry says. He feels like he’s gone from pleasantly drunk to rotten hungover in about ten seconds flat, and for the first time in a long time, he wants to be alone. “I’ve got to go home and do homework. I’ll see you tomorrow. Alright?”

“Okay,” Niall says. He looks like he could use a hug really badly, and right about now, Harry could too. But he’s worried that he’ll step into Niall’s arms and never be able to let go, so instead he gathers his things and retreats to the street, which is still dark and cold, and goes back to his empty apartment by himself.

 

***

 

Liam reacts to the news that Zayn is leaving the country by breaking up with him. He’s polite but firm about it, saying that “I don’t want to date someone if there’s no future in it,” which is probably the one thing he could’ve said to annoy Zayn the most. Zayn reacts by icing him out. Zayn spends a lot of time in his room blasting Usher and Jay-Z, and Liam comes out with Harry and Niall every weekend now, getting plastered and staying drunk well into his Monday classes.

“He needs to cut back,” Niall observes, watching him from their tiny table at another pub in Southie. It was a great show tonight, and they’re making a record-breaking $350 off of it. Niall sang that first poem Harry wrote about him the day he met Niall in the library, and it settled something in Harry’s chest.

“He’ll be okay,” Harry shrugs. “He’s just got to get it out of his system. They’ll get back together, surely?” Harry asks. Couples fight and break up and reunite all the time. ‘Cept him and Niall, but they don’t really fight very much, either.

Niall chews on his bottom lip. “Uh, well.”

Dread sinks through Harry’s stomach like a rock in water. “What?”

“So, like, freshman year. Zayn and Louis hooked up before Z and Payno got together. It wasn’t a big deal, so they didn’t really, like. Talk about it.”

Harry swallows his shock, and his mouthful of beer. “They lied to Liam?”

“Not lie, just…not tell. It’s fucked up, I know,” Niall agrees. “But look at it from Zayn’s point of view, you know? He’s desperately in love with this boy, why would he bother telling him that he hooked up with his friend a few times?”

Harry rubs his thumb against the label on his beer bottle till it starts to peel off. “Did you hook up with any of them?”

“Kissed Liam once,” Niall wrinkles his nose. “Wasn’t very good, to be honest.”

“I heard that!” Liam calls. The woman he’s speaking to puts her hand on his cheek and turns his face around, Liam nodding along glassy-eyed. They’ll be carrying him home within the hour.

When Harry looks back, Niall’s smiling at him. “Were you worried?”

“No,” Harry lies. “You’re desperately in love with me.”

Niall’s eyes crinkle when he smiles. He nudges Harry’s foot with his own beneath the table, and Harry melts into it. “Idiot,” Niall says fondly.

Harry very carefully moves aside their beer bottles so he won’t spill them when he leans across the table to kiss Niall, who smiles into the kiss.

           

***

 

It’s after a show at their biggest venue yet, the Paramount Theatre, that a big-looking man with an impossibly Southie accent calls out to them backstage. They have two guitars and one amp between them, so it’s pretty easy for them to break down their setup and head back to the nearest bar.

Harry’s fake ID is starting to look a little worn, to be honest, and the picture of himself on it with a fringe and the striped shirt isn’t aging as well as he’d like. He wears his hair in a quiff now and he doesn’t think he’d smile like he did in the picture. Louis had taken the picture and checked it on his monitor with a laugh.

“What’s wrong with it?” Harry demanded.

“You look like my mom if my mom looked like Florence Henderson,” Louis laughed.

Harry thought about it. “I look like Carol Brady?”

“Why do you sound so pleased about that?” Louis kept laughing.

Niall straightens up with an extension chord wrapped around his arm. “Hey,” he calls, polite but firm. Harry turns to look at the stranger, who is taller than either of them and as broad as both. “Can we help you?”

The stranger strolls up to them like he’s on wheels, it’s so smooth and purposeful. Harry wishes he looked more like that than a bumbling giraffe sometimes. Maybe when he’s older.

“I’m looking for the band, uh, USP?”

“That is not our name!” Niall looks as peeved as he does every time someone mentions it.

“Sorry, our, uh, manager came up with that,” Harry says. He grimaces. “It stands for Unique Selling Point. Can you believe.”

Niall grumbles, “You can, I still can’t. Liam the idiot…”

“Well, if you’re them, then I have an offer for you,” says the Southie guy. He clears his throat and says, “My name is Paul Higgins and I’m a representative of Sony. You boys have quite a lot of buzz around you for the outfit you’ve put together.” He raises an eyebrow at their dirty sneakers, Harry’s babyish face, the denim jacket Niall only just invested in. Harry thinks he looks hot but under the stage lights maybe he just looks like a throwback to the nineties.

Niall raises an eyebrow at him. “One of my cousins called you, didn’t they?”

Paul laughs. “One of our cousins, actually.”

“Oh,” Niall laughs. “It’s that kind of thing.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t just gas you up because my cousin Eoghan said I had to. You’re good, and if you’d like, I can arrange a meeting with some guys from the label to see if we can sign you on. It’d just be an EP, but it’s a start,” he shrugs.

Harry glances sideways at Niall, a peculiarly nervous fluttering happening in his stomach, like it’s sprouted wings and wants to fly away. A flush is spreading up Niall’s cheeks and he’s started doing that thing with his arms where he holds his fists up to his shoulders like he’s a mime stuck in a very small box, so Harry knows he’s super excited.

Niall doesn’t shut up about Paul or the label thing all the way home, either. “An EP,” he keeps saying. “We could be a signed act. We could _tour._ ” Luckily he’s so excited Harry doesn’t have to say much, he can just nod along and try to pretend he doesn’t feel a vice closing in around his heart.

Niall notices he’s quiet, though. He runs them a bath because he reckons Harry must be getting sick, so Harry climbs into the tub with him and tips his head back against Niall’s chest so Niall can shampoo his hair.

“We could be the next Gram and Emmylou,” Niall’s saying softly, only half-joking, his voice as soft as if Harry really were sick.

“Keith Richards and Mick Jagger,” he answers, smiling. They’ve played this game before.

Niall’s fingers gently tug through Harry’s curls. “Mark Olson and Gary Louris.”

“Bono and Edge,” Harry counters. Niall’s fingers trace the shape of Harry’s collarbone.

“Think we’re more like Adam and Larry, to be honest,” Niall observes, and Harry lets the ball of tension in the middle of his chest relax a little. Everything’s still the same, for now; nothing’s happened yet. Harry closes his eyes and Niall moves in. He presses a kiss to Harry’s cheek, lingering with his forehead on the side of Harry’s head. “You're my best friend,” he tells Harry. 

“You're my best friend, too,” Harry says. And that's the thing, he thinks. He wants Niall to stay his best friend, for everything to stay the same. Just for a minute. 

 

***

 

March marches out, and April arrives in a whole new load of spring flowers BU shipped in to make the campus pretty for high school seniors and their parents on campus tours. They drive Harry’s allergies crazy, which sucks for him, but it makes his voice extra raspy, so Niall likes it.

He stops by the 7/11 for a Slurpee after class, pretending not to imagine that Louis’s there with him, and walks down Comm Ave to the thrift store where he’d agreed to meet Niall.

“Hey,” Niall smiles. He smiles every time he sees Harry. It’s one of Harry’s favorite things about him. He ducks his head in for a kiss and steals a gulp of the Slurpee on his way out, and he makes the same face he makes when he orgasms. Harry tries to step on his toes, not in _public,_ they agreed after the last time they got walked in on backstage. “Thanks for meeting me, if we don’t do this now all the good ones will be gone.”

“Good what?” Harry asks, wondering if the frat has them in a costume party soon. The boys from the frat are Harry’s and Niall’s band’s biggest supporter except for maybe Niall’s family. Half the crowd is usually made up of people they know which is somehow even better than when it’s strangers, because they get to celebrate afterwards and it’s like a really good party. Like the kind that you don’t ever want to stop because it makes you feel so close to everyone.

Niall gives Harry an impatient look. “Dresses, dork, look,” he holds a pink polka-dot number up to himself. “What do you think?”

Carefully, Harry says, “Why are you shopping for dresses, Niall?”

“For the drag ball at the end of the semester, the one Delta Lambda does. I knew you weren’t listening,” he narrows his eyes.

“Why do we ever try and talk after we have sex?” Harry wonders. “We’ve got to learn someday.”

Niall shrugs, giving up easily. Temperatures outside still haven’t cracked sixty degrees, but Niall has already broken out his collection of tank tops. His pale freckled shoulders move beneath the straps in a way that definitely shouldn’t be so mesmerizing. Harry wants to lick his armpits and bite his biceps till his teeth leave marks. “So anyway, we’ve got to buy ours now if we want to look good. Otherwise all the nice ones will go and we’ll be left with muumuus. I don’t know what a muumuu is but I don’t want to be the ugliest guy at the ball.”

“Aw,” Harry touches Niall’s cheek. “I’ll make you look beautiful, I promise.”

“No heels for you. I’ve seen pictures of you in Gemma’s dress-up clothes as a kid and we spend way too much money on vodka for the punch bowl for you to spill it.”

“I object,” Harry says mildly, mostly because Niall’s right.

Niall gives him one of those looks. “Alright, Lawyer Styles.”

Harry’s not a lawyer, and moreover, he’s decided not to be one. He still has to tell his mom and get approval from the College of Arts & Sciences to change his major, but…yeah, he’s not. He clears his throat and tells Niall, haltingly, “No, actually. It’s English Major Styles to you.”

Niall rocks on his heels, his hand on the sleeve of a truly atrocious purple velvet dress. God, Harry hopes it fits. “Really?” he grins.

“Yeah?” Harry asks. Somewhere along the way school started to feel like not so much of a burden, maybe when he realized he liked to learn some things, and not others, and that was okay. It still matters to him, though, even if he does most of his reading hunched over on the edge of the bathtub so he doesn’t wake Niall because he’d been too tired to contemplate walking downstairs. He’s sure. He wants Niall to care.

“I’m really fucking proud of you, Harry,” Niall says, pulling Harry in by his collar. Muffled against his shoulder, he says, “Dead proud of you, I am.”

Harry kisses the flushed tip of Niall’s ear, the closest bit of him within reach. “Dibs on the velvet dress,” he says, and Niall laughs and lets him have it.

They take the the train up to New York on a journey Harry’s very familiar with by now. He sits on the aisle seat and watches Niall watch Boston fade out of view, a curious line of tension to his mouth. “‘Cept for Ireland, this is as far away as I’ve ever been,” Niall laughs. Harry puts his hand on Niall’s knee.

His leg hair is soft through the rends at his knees. They’d both fretted about what to wear to this meeting with producers until Niall finally gave up and called Paul, who said to dress like themselves. So Niall’s in skinny jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, and Harry’s wearing his favorite pair of black skinny jeans and Niall’s River shirt.

“We’ll be back,” Harry says, aiming for reassuring.

“Yeah, but what if we’re not?” Niall counters. Enthusiasm bubbles under his voice like carbonation inside a Coke bottle with the lid on. Harry shook one up in the backseat of his mom’s car when he was a little boy and soda exploded all over everything. “What if we get a deal and they let us make an EP and we get to tour? Won’t that be, like…Christ, I want it,” he laughs.

Harry strokes his thumb across Niall’s bony knee, nodding like he gets it. Maybe that’s it, that he does get it – he still remembers the weeks and months leading up to his acceptance letter from BU and wondering how he’d ever get a chance to make something of himself without it – but that he doesn’t know what to do about it.

He and Niall get off at the Union City station. Paul gave them a tiny travel budget, so they splurge on a taxi through Lincoln Tunnel and the Garment District, the Empire State Building so close now that all they can see of it is its shadow. Niall watches it all with his face pressed to the glass. The taxi drops them off at the Avenue of the Americas and Harry watches Niall’s long legs excitedly take him down the street, his head constantly turning to take in everything.

Harry doesn’t realize that he’s stopped walking until Niall looks back for him and he’s far enough away that Harry can only see the top of his brassy hair glinting in the sun. “What’s wrong?” Niall asks, doubling back to him.

“I’m not ready,” Harry tells Niall. The words have felt like a weight, like something awful and sick-making, at the bottom of his stomach since they met Paul. It doesn’t feel any better coming up. It just feels a lot like throwing up. “I’m not ready to do this, I don’t want to get signed.”

“What do you mean?” Niall asks. “I thought – you said you wanted this too, you said you were excited. We wanted this.” The last part comes out a question, for which Harry’s always going to feel guilty.

Harry licks his lips. “I do, just – not yet. I’m – I just want to go home, you know? To BU and Comm Ave and the house, and my classes and my professors, and.” And _you._  

“You don’t want this,” Niall repeats, repeating it like it’s finally sinking in. “Have you never wanted it? Did I make you…?”

“No, I,” Harry starts. “It’s like when you’re a little kid and you have to have the training wheels on your bike before you can learn to take them off. I’m not ready, yet, for…I’m not ready, I,” his voice cracks, and he swallows before the sobs start bubbling out. “Please can we just go home?”

Niall licks his lips, his eyes so blue. The sunlight sends shadows of his eyelashes falling across his cheeks and Harry’s suddenly so sure that he’s never going to have someone this beautiful again. “I don’t to teach Spanish, Harry,” Niall finally says. “I don’t want to translate at the bank or edit magazines. This is my shot, you know? To do something I really want to do.”

“We could get another,” Harry says desperately. “We could come back, Paul’s your cousin –”

“This is my shot,” Niall cuts under him, his voice so soft. “Not just ‘cuz of that, you know? Because if I don’t now, I,” he licks his lips. “I don’t want to live in Southie my whole life and become a butcher like my dad, not without doing other stuff first. But it’s so easy, you get that, right? It’s so easy to do the easy thing. I want to try,” he points down the road.

“I can’t,” Harry just says. “Not yet, it’s too soon.”

Niall’s shoulders slump. Then he takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders, his jaw flexing. “You don’t have to come,” he says, “but I’m going.”

So Harry watches him turn back and walk away, his distinctive hair lost amongst the crowd sooner even than Harry thought.

He catches a taxi to his mom’s house because he’s home in New York and none of his other usual haunts sound so good. The MoMA is right there but Harry thinks if he went inside right now he’d just end up crying to his favorite painting, which is not what schoolchildren on a field trip need to see.

He goes home. His mom is on her lunch break when Harry fumbles his old house key into the lock and goes inside to find her, her hair neatly swept back in a bun. The second Harry sees her, he starts crying.

She cuddles him into her arms, making the same soothing noises she did when he was a baby and she could properly sit him in her lap. She guides him to the couch and holds him close until Harry realizes that he can cry as hard as he wants, it won’t stop his world from falling apart.

“Now,” Anne says, smoothing his curls back from his face. “Baby, what’s this about?”

Harry drops his head on her shoulder and wonders where to begin. “I,” he starts, stops. “I think me and Niall just broke up.”

“Why,” Anne asks, smoothing the hair down at the back of his head. “That boy is so in love with you, Harry, you must know.”

Harry closes his eyes. “It just wouldn’t have worked out, I guess,” he tries. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like he’s dying. “I really loved him, too,” he has to say.

“Shh, shh,” Anne shushes him, and Harry lets himself be coddled on the couch like he’s a little child. She doesn’t push for an explanation, and he doesn’t offer one. He has a train ticket back to Boston but he can’t imagine sitting next to Niall and arguing with him or worse, being faced by Niall’s cold silence.

Harry asks Robin to drive him back to campus, and all three of them take the three-hour trip. Harry rolls down his window when he starts crying again and lets the soft spring wind rake over his face. BU at night is the most beautiful place in the world. Harry doesn’t think it often, but then he sees the tower lit and all the old chalky red brick buildings, he knows.

“We’d love to come visit you sometime,” Anne says. “You can show us around?”

Harry nods. He doesn’t know why they haven’t done it sooner. He texts Niall on his walk up to his apartment, forgetting that his backpack and books and laptop are still at Niall’s. His hypoallergenic pillows, too, and his favorite mug.

_Did you get home okay?_

_I’m ok_ Niall sends back. _Wbu?_

Harry goes straight to bed and lays down without taking his shoes off. He clutches his phone to his chest hard enough to hurt. _I love you._

 _Ur my best friend_  Niall sends back. _We_ _shud probably talk_

Harry lays awake for a long time, trying to imagine what tomorrow will be like.

“You’re sure?” Niall asks, picking at the cardboard sleeve on his coffee cup. He hates Starbucks, only drinks it because Harry loves it. He asked that they meet here, though, and Harry wasn’t going to argue with him. “I can’t convince you to come with me?” he flashes Harry a weak grin. “LA’s beautiful in the summer, they say.”

Harry wants to put his head down on the table and sleep, he’s so wrung out. He wants to take Niall’s familiar flushed face between his hands and kiss him till he can’t think anymore, till his mouth is sore and his clothes are all twisted around and his hair is impossibly tangled. He wants to sleep in Niall’s bed in the house with the leaky gutters until time runs backward and he can do it all over again.

“We don’t have to break up,” he mumbles. “We can still – I still love you.”

Niall puts his hand over Harry’s. He rubs Harry’s hand with his thumb. “I’m so in love with you it hurts,” he admits freely, because Niall’s learned to be the brave one for both of them. “But maybe – it’s like Liam said, right? I don’t want to be with you till I leave like we’re some casual thing.”

Harry starts crying. He really doesn’t mean to and he doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it. He’s so mad at himself for not even being able to do this _one_ thing, it just makes him cry harder. “I don’t want to be your ex,” he says, because it’s the only way he knows to sum up all the things they were, that he lost. A past-tense. _X_ , blotted out, gone.

Niall just pats his back, his face streaming tears, too. It feels anticlimactic after everything they’d been through. Maybe there’s something natural about it, though. Like that poem, “ _Everything falls apart; the centre cannot hold._ ” Harry thinks of Louis, now with a newborn baby in New Haven, and Zayn, who’s already started packing to study abroad. Liam, who Niall says is going with Niall, as his unofficial manager. They won’t even stay for the frat’s drag ball.

Maybe they never had a center, or maybe it’s that their center was temporary, this university where nobody’s meant to stay forever. That’s what Harry thinks about when he’s all cried out in bed after the end of another long day. He got a job at a café on campus slinging sandwiches and it leaves him so drained, emptied out, somehow. He thinks about finding something permanent to center around, instead, and he wonders if it’ll be someone. He hopes it will be.

 

***

 

Two years goes by pretty fast, even if it doesn’t feel that way at the time. Harry graduates early with a 3.7 GPA and glowing recommendations from his favorite professors. His mom sheds a tear, and Gemma hooks her arm around his neck and holds him close. He didn’t wade through the fountain with his classmates because he was scared of catching pneumonia around finals, so Gemma makes him go before they meet their parents for lunch. It’s shockingly cold, and Harry can picture the other boys with him, Niall’s echoing laughter and Zayn’s shy smile and the way Louis would’ve tried to shove Liam’s head beneath the water. Then he climbs out of the fountain, takes his sopping graduation robe off, and goes to meet his family.

He kept in touch with the boys a little. Louis’s still out in New Haven but he’s been taking community college classes to finish his degree. He’s going to be a drama teacher, just like he always meant to.

Zayn came home last spring and they got stoned on the floor of Harry’s apartment like they wanted to smoke themselves to death, and then the next day Zayn went out and got them both bottles of orange juice and made Harry promise not to do that again. Some stupid things you just have to do once, though. Just to try it out. He asked, cautiously, about Liam. Part of Harry hopes Zayn’s tracking him down. Part of Harry wishes it was him.

Harry moves out of Lou’s and Tom’s place after breaking the lease he signed with Niall and wound up on the market too late to find an affordable place. He goes back to New York and finds a job at an indie printing press in Brooklyn. He’d thought he was done with writing after Niall wasn’t there to sing his poems for him anymore, but by that point, he’d needed to get everything out.

Coping mechanisms are funny like that. It doesn’t matter how they started, sometimes they’re what stays with you long after everything else is gone. And Harry did a lot of writing. When the press promises to publish some of his poems in the next volume. Harry’s family celebrates when he tells them, including Doctor Gemma Styles, newly acquitted with a Ph.D. Harry’s very proud of her. She’s a complete nerd.

He doesn’t go to law school, and Anne’s not surprised. “I thought you might be upset,” Harry says, when he’s been working for a few months and Anne’s not made mention of the GRE or law school applications.

“Oh, honey,” Anne rolls her eyes. She pushes the jar of jam over to him, so he butters a biscuit. “You always make me proud.”

Harry spreads the jam more slowly. “I was in a band with Niall,” he finally says. Sometimes it seems like it never happened at all, and then he runs into one of Niall’s million cousins in Boston and he remembers those few months when they were like his own family, and he loved them. “In college. Don’t know why I never told you.”

If he expects Anne to be surprised, he’s sorely disappointed. “I know,” she says.

Harry’s jaw drops. “How did you know?”  

“Niall called me,” she explains simply. “He said he didn’t know if you ever meant to tell me about what you boys were up to, so he wanted to invite me to a show.”

Stupidly, all Harry can think to ask is, “Did you like it?”

“You looked like you were having the time of your life,” Anne says fondly. She pats his hand on the table, her touch cool. “You always make me proud,” she repeats.

Weird, how sometimes you just aren’t ready to see things a different way. And then you are.

He starts looking for Niall on a dreary Tuesday. He doesn’t mean to, and then he Googles Niall’s name and starts reading through the articles that pop up, and by the time he’s exhausted Google’s article history, he starts going through his social media. It’s harder to get in touch with a celebrity, even a minor one, than Harry thought.

Even though he read that Buzzfeed article about how most celebrity social media accounts aren’t run by celebrities themselves, Harry starts @’ing Niall on some of the boring pictures he takes on his commute to and from work. It’s like that game he’d played after they broke up, where he’d imagine Niall was with him so that he could do some things again. Take the train to a random stop and look for something fun to do. Hang out in the lobby of an art museum and find someone to talk to, someone whose story to learn. Only this time, he’s trying to play with Niall.

Louis calls him to come visit one day in October, so Harry borrows Robin’s car and drives himself, enjoying the ride. The leaves are all shades of orange and red and green, and Harry thinks about all the things the poets wrote about them. He thinks about what they should’ve said instead: _they come back._ And leaves it at that.

Louis’s baby isn’t a tiny baby anymore, Harry is shocked to find. She’s a teeny tiny little human who walks and talks, and Harry watches her with rapt attention. So does Louis.

“So,” Louis finally says, when the tiny girl’s knocked out in Harry’s arms, her eyelids flickering while she dreams. “Liam texted me.”

Harry jerks his head up. “You still talk?”

“Course we do, we’re still friends, idiot,” Louis laughs. “He says if you want Niall’s number, you can ask for it. Idiot,” Louis repeats, sounding impossibly fond. Zayn gets home not much later, a half-guilty smile on his face when he spots Harry. Zayn presses a sloppy kiss to Louis’s cheek and then he goes for Harry, so Harry pretends to hide behind the sleeping baby. Harry thinks about the love story he thought he knew, and the one he sees instead. Liam wasn’t the kind of center that held, either. They look good together, after all that.

Harry doesn’t really plan on calling, and then he’s pulling out of Louis’s driveway and heading toward the interstate and his phone is in his hand.

Niall picks up on the second ring. “Hello?” he asks. Harry’s number is clearly an unknown.

“Hey, Mark,” Harry says. He bites his bottom lip.

“Hey, Gary,” Niall says, after a long tense moment of silence. He laughs. “How ya been, Mick?”

“Just saw Louis’s baby,” Harry answers. “Have you met her?”

“No, I keep meaning to come out that way,” Niall says. The soft sounds of fabric rustling come through the line; Harry imagines him in a hotel bed somewhere overseas, getting comfy. “What’s she like?”

Harry smiles. “An angel. I’m not sure Louis’s her real dad.”

“Talk shit about Bri and I’ll bust your kneecaps,” Niall says mildly, in his best Southie accent.

Nothing momentous happens. They just get to know each other again in odd moments, on terrible postmodern apps Harry only downloads because Niall sends him pictures of the crowds at his shows and his guitars in those heavy black cases and his stage crew, and Harry sends back things he’s written.

He signed a contract, when he was nineteen, giving Niall ownership of the songs he wrote while they were together. It’s made listening to the radio impossible for years. Now he quite likes them. Niall tells him the stories of getting each song recorded, what he was thinking of while he sang. It’s nice. It’s like hearing their love story live on in a way that’s bigger and better than he is.

"I never told you," Niall says, interrupting himself from a story about meeting James Bay at a concert. "That day I came up to you, in the library. When we were kids. It wasn't just 'cos you looked lonely. It's 'cos I was lonely, too." 

"You changed my life," Harry volunteers. Harry thinks about all of Niall's wordless ways of saying I love you, and he feels so terrifyingly, excitingly young again. 

“So,” Niall finally asks. “When are you coming out on the road with me?”

“Was just waiting for you to ask,” Harry answers honestly.

 

***

 

Niall hollers down the hall, “The interviewer’s already here, Haz, get your little ass out here!” Harry can hear the front door open, Niall’s voice going quiet and polite while he greets the interviewer from the Rolling Stone. They took bets on his name last night; Harry’s pulling for a William Miller. He carefully ties the scarf around his head – honestly, you’d think he wouldn’t need more than one try at this after all these damn years – and then he shuffles out to greet them.

The Rolling Stone interviewer is a girl, which at least means Niall wasn’t right, either. Harry wedges his skinny ass onto the left side of the sofa, nudging Niall over, because his left side is his best side and he wants the interviewer to get it. Niall pretends to be annoyed, and then he slides his hand over the back of Harry’s hand. He flips his palm up and their fingers weave together with the seamless ease of long practice.

“So,” she starts, tucking a glossy lock of hair behind her ear. “First question up, it’s an easy one: how do you make a partnership work for forty years?”

Harry looks at Niall, who’s always been better with his words. Niall takes a moment to look around their living room, which is cluttered with decades’ worth of making friends and traveling to distant places. His eyes catch on the picture they took at Liam’s a few years back – well, seven years, now – at their wrinkled faces and their wizened bodies.

“Dunno,” Niall finally says, relaxing into the back of the couch. Harry bumps Niall’s shoulder with his and Niall grins, his laughter lines creasing familiarly. “Guess it’s not as fun alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you very much for reading. love you


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